


The Rains

by zenstrike



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/F, F/M, Psychosis, Strong Language, Violence, either fixed it or made it worse, shifting pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 15:14:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11762595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: The galaxy wavers at the edge of the war's end. Commander Shepard wants to hide away from confronting the consequences of her final decision, and the shadow it casts over her character. Grounded and desperate, her brother tries to save her--not understanding that she is the last person in need of rescuing.An ME3 ending re-telling, with twin Shepards and the question: when has Shepard done enough?





	1. TITLE

 

THE RAINS

by

zenstrike

 art by

[FrogMakesArt](https://frogmakesart.deviantart.com/)

 

 

"Before the rains, I was a different person. It shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose, that death unhinges you, its absolute weight. Nothing holds on to its meaning anymore. My world of thank-you notes and charity donations and organic eggs and separating garbage--gone. Does it matter I never meant anyone harm? In my moment of truth, my ego won and that outcome is what defines me, drawing the picture of who I am."

\- Claire Polders, "The Alps in Fall Time"


	2. PROLOGUE

“I had all of eternity because time is infinite when we don’t expect anything.”

Kim Thúy, _Mãn_

 

__

 

Fire and rebirth—she has done this before.

It feels familiar, the pain and the burning, though she remembers very little of her first death: suffocation in a vacuum, consumption by fire. And then now: choking on uncertainty and then burning up until every last glimpse of the stars is lost. They were close. They had always been close. She had spent so many nights of her childhood staring up at the sky, desperate for a glimpse of the stars through the smoke and ceaseless lights of Vancouver. Now, she would die twice among them. Earth— _home_ , truly, now that she was older and braver and stronger or thought she was and that had been enough for this war or she so he had hoped _how she had hoped—_

Earth is a better grave than Alchera. There is drama to her charred, still-new body plummeting to the planet where she had been born and where she had raised herself from a different sort of ashes. It is a temptation that felt old but is younger than her body: let her die. Let it end and time will crawl to a stop and she will carry herself beyond it and leave behind the burning and the pain and the dying that had surrounded her for too long. Too damned long. But this was her path, every choice leading her to this point and _how she had hoped—_

There should have been more than this. Standing now on the edge of an end, there should have been more than this. She should have collapsed in the face of it but she stood, she dragged herself up and wanted more than what was offered. It’s foolish: standing in front of a constructed god and demanding more than it was willing to offer her. Sacrifices are made in war. Sacrifices are made in battle and in the fight for peace. Sacrifices are the nature of her life and she has already given so much so what is one more friend, one more people but _how she had hoped—_

These are her last thoughts: regret, and the painful awareness that she could have chosen another path. She could have saved so many more but she is selfish in her last moments and _she had hoped—_

(Hope has nothing to do with it. Hope has nothing to do with it. Hope has nothing to do with it. Hope has _—_

Hope has no place here and she needs to remember that she had come to this point with a purpose and she had not faltered.)

Pain is a fog. Death comes on a pyre of a galaxy's hopes. And still, Shepard would fight.

She has done this before.

* * *

 

She had a perfect view of the stars, but her back was to Earth. Shepard knew that if she took more than a split second to consider this she'd laugh: that was the metaphor that would go down in her biographical history, wasn't it? Always with her back to her own homeworld.

"Well?"

The Catalyst's voice echoed around her, ringing in her ears. There was a headache starting behind her eyes but the pain in her side was starting to fade. The pain in her bones and her muscles and her soul. Hell, she might even be able to stand straight again. She didn't try.

She looked down and met the blank eyes of the Catalyst. Her chest clenched and she swallowed down her regret, forcing herself to see beyond the child before her. "Well," she echoed.

"It's time," it said. In a shimmer, it turned towards the three paths.

"I know," she said, and like that was all she needed she took her first painful, halting step forwards.

"This is a decision that cannot be unmade," the Catalyst warned, but it was already far behind her.

"I know," she said again, and her grip tightened on the pistol. Each drag of her feet, she felt her certainty grow until she was almost steady. Behind her, she knew, trailed lives that she had fought for and now was about to cast aside. A trail of bodies and broken promises but in front of her was the end of this long war.

She raised the pistol and turned her eyes from the glowing red. Above her, the entire galaxy seemed to swim. The battle was raging on and no-one knew that she was about to end it, once and for all.

"So you have finally become the butcher," the Catalyst boomed behind her, its voice changed and making what remained of her skin crawl.

Shepard flinched but didn’t turn her eyes from the stars. She didn’t know what was going to happen, what the firing of the Crucible would really look like. She hoped beyond what she had ever hoped before that the _Normandy_ —her crew, her people—would run.

She fired, and her instinctual turn from the ensuing blast was not enough to save her from the heat and the fire.

Get out, she thought and opened her mouth to scream into the blast.

"This is condemnation," came the call through every burning nerve ending and tearing its ways through her ears.

She knew that she had disappointed the Catalyst. She wondered what would happen next.

She closed her eyes.

* * *

 

The hope is that she will do it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art by the magnificent frogmakesart!!


	3. AVOIDANCE

“I had learned how to fall asleep very quickly, on command, so that my eyelids would serve as curtains over landscapes or scenes from which I preferred to be absent.”

Kim Thúy, _Mãn_

 

Jane Shepard was born in 2154 in Vancouver. Her mother was aided by a University of British Columbia medical student at the UBC general hospital, where only one hundred and twelve more babies would be born before the maternity ward was shut down and all operations shifted between other hospitals throughout the sprawling metropolis of downtown Greater Vancouver. She never knew her mother and only learned the details of her birth, such as they are, when she was much older and only mildly curious, bored by the recovery time of her post-Elysium self and waiting for the rest of her life to begin.

Vancouver.

She grew to love the city, in her own way, when she was older and more firmly herself--a woman, a grown and brave soldier (grown enough and soldier enough to acknowledge her own bravery). The Vancouver of her adolescence, however, sparked something very different in her, something dark and twisted and angry. While there was a certain beauty to the gleaming, towering skyscrapers and the stretching, modern metropoles that made up Vancouver, more obvious to the young Shepard was the sensation of being trapped by the city and the people who swarmed around its base.

She ran with the Reds from the age of twelve. She loved it until she was sixteen, and then it was as though she blinked and saw the truth of what was around her. Certainly, the grim darkness and overwhelming dirt of the Vancouver she had known remained, but her new awareness, her older awareness, had her staring into the brutality of what the Reds were slowly become. She would not be surprised when, as the Reaper Invasion gripped the galaxy and her own death bit at her heels and memories, she heard that the Reds had been swallowed up by Cerberus. Chewed up and spit out as shock troopers taken apart by a shot between the eyes.

She loved it until she was sixteen, or she gave it the closest thing to love she could muster. She learned dedication and adaptability. She laid the groundwork for the engineer she would become, without truly understanding what she was doing. She observed. And, for four steady years, she thought little of what she saw beyond what they would be doing tomorrow. Nothing about the Reds changed when she turned sixteen. Nothing about Vancouver changed when she turned sixteen. Very little about her own self changed, except that she fell in love and then she wanted more, and then she saw more.

_Rebecca, exhausted and sore, stretching her legs over Jane’s lap as they listen from the corner, watching, until Fushikawa becomes their new leader in a short haze of gunfire. Jane, pressing her back against the wall and saying nothing while Rodriguez is dragged away, to be disposed of and forgotten somewhere else. She sees flashes of memories of Rodriguez's face, scarred and dark and the closest thing to a mother Jane had ever known even if that was a fantasy built on hope that she wasn't sure she actually felt. Rebecca, mustering up the last of her energy, standing and declaring both of their loyalty and Jane without the voice to contradict her._

_Linking arms as her omni-tool counts the credits siphoned from the terminal in front of them. Rebecca tugging her away, and whispering in her ear all the things they could do with the money, all the places they could be and all the people they could be. The stretch of Jane’s skin as she grins and the breath of Rebecca's laughter against her cheek. The knowledge that all this is a daydream but one that she believes they share, and then--_

_Loyalty to Fushikawa meaning loyalty to violence and ambition. Rebecca declaring them to be ambitious, and Jane only able to stare at her. In her memories, her voice is only able to tell Rebecca how much she loves her. Jane knows, as she watches her past unfold, that they are making a plan to hide the body and Rebecca's hands are shaking from adrenaline rather than fear, rather than regret._

(Shepard remembered this for all of her days. Every raise of her gun, she demanded understanding of her own motivations. Regret made her stronger.)

_Fushikawa, arm around her shoulders, laying the groundwork for what the Reds will become. Jane doesn't believe a word that leaves his mouth, and she finds herself missing Rodriguez at the same time she has her first, fervent wish that something--someone--would die. She doesn't smile, and Fushikawa doesn't demand it from her: all he wants is her most honest effort. She gives it to him, and he gives her her first sniper rifle._

_Rebecca lacks the patience to learn and obsess over mods the same way Jane does. She pulls her from the bench and announces dreams that Jane doesn't share and one night they are stopped by an Alliance soldier and talk their way away._

_When she begins to raise the first inklings of the idea, Rebecca covers her face with a limp pillow and hisses that she needs to drown that puppy before it grows into a monster. Jane only half-understands. She doesn't try to convince Rebecca to come with her. She doesn't condemn Rebecca when she tells Fushikawa about Jane's secret hopes._

_Jane, the night before she is eighteen and before she leaves the Reds for good, holds Rebecca’s hand and doesn’t flinch when Rebecca spits in her face. Jane wipes it away and promises that no-one is going to touch her without permission again. Rebecca says she wanted her to want more._

_Jane does. Jane enlists. She is eighteen and only a little heartbroken. She doesn’t look back for many years, and Earth is just one piece of a slur slung at her while she earns her place._  

* * *

 

She wakes and knows before she takes her first, waking breath that her body will be sore. Shepard holds herself tensely in her sleep, clenches her muscles and her mind around nightmares and memories. In the years since Elysium, she has learned to feel the shifts in her muscles as she wakes and how to carry herself through the rest of her day. Today will be no different, though as she stares up at the ceiling she wonders what she will really need to carry herself through. In the apartment, even wandering the rest of the Citadel, the war seems far away. Or--the war seems easier to drift passed. She doesn't know if she misses it or not, but she knows she misses her ship and the safety of the _Normandy's_ hull around her. The comfort of knowing her crew and her friends are within reach and within the reach of safety.

Even this doesn’t stop her from imagining a peaceful existence doing ridiculous, civilian things. There is a faint hope stirring in her belly that Jane Shepard can live a civilian life.

This stirs her into movement. Pain rockets through her limbs. As she sits up and then stands, it begins to fade and she dresses. The pain is still enough to spur memories, not of Earth now, but of the first moments of her new life. Death had been a nightmare of its own and the pains of the Lazarus Project—of her resurrection—were not so different from the day to day pains of a body pushed to its limits. Her scars are more or less healed. She wants the memories to be the same but it seems that everything is still too fresh.

The nature of light in the apartment always throws her off first thing as she wakes, like the ground she steps on isn’t quite real and she’s about to fade into the dimmed neon of the strip outside. Her first moment alone, away from the _Normandy_ and her crew, Shepard had felt more than a little apprehensive: shore leave tended to mean letting loose for a handful of days, but she wanted a little bit of peace, a little bit of time away from the pressure of the _Normandy_ 's slapstick war room and the universal impatience for the Crucible to be finished.

Shepard pauses and looks over the first floor of the apartment. She leans one hand against the railing and begins to hear a small humming noise before she finally realizes it is coming from the back of her own throat. From below she can hear the faint, quiet sounds of laughter and light conversation, maybe the sizzling of a pan. Some of the tension leaves her shoulders and she leans her head back, cracking her neck and breathing out a long, desperate breath: _relax, Shepard_.

She doesn't. Instead, she pushes herself away from the edge, shoves her hands in her hoodie pockets, and makes her slow way down the steps.

When she looks up, she first realizes she was watching her feet and then that Garrus had stepped out of the kitchen to wait for her. She smiles.

"Good morning," she says.

"Morning," he says. Their hands meet partway between them and she is surprised, again, how easy it is to be together. "Sleep well?"

She pulls her hand away. Her smile falters. She tilts her head. There is a memory at the edge of her mind: gratitude and confusion, and sitting side by side in her cabin. She can't place the memory exactly, but then again that has been the undercurrent of their relationship since Omega: the slightest confusions, and the struggle to match memories and moments to her feelings now.

"About the same," is the answer she settles on and puts her hands in her pockets again.

He nods. They walk into the kitchen together and James yells a greeting and Shepard asks how the hell he got in the apartment already. Garrus is a comforting presence by her elbow, but then again--they all are. She wants to cocoon herself within them.

* * *

 

 _They are on the edge of something awesome and she knows it. They all know it. Even as she struggles to find words to ignite them all, she knows her crew--her squad--her friends need none from her. And for the soldiers? To have the Commander present is more than enough. In this moment, Shepard is grateful to be simply that:_ Shepard _. A symbol, a soldier, the right hand of what had become more resistance movement than war effort. So, when she finds him, as though he was waiting for her_ (he was) _she doesn't try to find something clumsy or elegant to say. They simply are, and it is tender enough to break her heart and reconsider asking him to come with her. She doesn't have to say anything when the time comes: he and Liara are ready and waiting for her before she blinks._

_Into the breach, she thinks but doesn't say. She leaves behind who they are together and knows he does the same._

_Is it any surprise that it all goes to shit when she leaves them? The_ Normandy _leaves afterimages all across her brain and she barely thinks as she barrels towards the end._

_Flat on her back, struggling to breathe while they crawl under her skin, she holds onto the memory of their clasped hands. It isn't enough to save her but it's enough to spur her into painful movement, and throw herself into the light._


	4. SURRENDER

“In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.”

Chuck Klosterman, _I Wear the Black Hat_

 

_Decisions are made, after Bahak and once she has been able to sleep. It takes days. There are a delirious handful of hours when she pushes away her friends. Miranda brings Liara aboard and Jane all but throws both out. When she comes out of the daze, Garrus is sitting next to her on the bed and Jane is soaked in sweat. It is the first time she is immensely grateful to have him nearby like this, but it is not the last and she has yet to realize what a rock he will become for her--or what she has been for him. She showers, she burns the Cerberus logo from all the clothes she can get her hands on, and then she enters the CIC with Garrus at her side and sees the relief on the faces of her crew._

_"This is it," is what she says. She doesn't know what she means, but she carries on anyways. This is the leader Commander Shepard is, making it up as she goes along and somehow, mostly, getting it right. It should be someone else, she thinks, and buys time by staring at the Galaxy Map and then the regular flashing light at her private terminal._

_She will speak to Hackett soon. She wonders if he knows she is alive._

_What has she done?_

_Jane goes looking for the Commander, and finds her in the faces of her squad._

_One by one, they leave. Or, she releases them. Or, she forces them to go. By the time they finally_ _begin making their way to the Sol system, only Mordin, Tali, and Garrus remain aboard and all three with plans that go beyond the confines of Alliance custody. Jane has none such plans._

_"Make noise," she tells them. Only Garrus nods. Tali is barely breathing, Mordin frozen still in what she recognizes now as anger. "Don't let them forget this time." None of them ask what she means._

_It is Kaidan who meets her at the Alliance docks. His face is hard, disbelieving. There is an audience._

_She is the first of the rogue crew to offer herself over. She is the only one arrested, even if the rest are all but. She has no chance to say goodbye to Garrus, to Tali, to Mordin. She trusts in each of them, as she trusts in each member of her crew, of her squad._

_The eyes burn as she is led away; their gazes are heavy. She hears the word_ butcher _and flinches._

_Then, distantly, Jane hears:_ Shepard is a hero _. She doesn't know that much of the Alliance is divided by her actions, that there are camps demanding her head and those wanting to deify her. It is James who tells her, and it is Shepard who is horrified._

_She lets her hair grow out._

(Butcher.) (Shepard is a hero.) 

* * *

 

_Shore leave is a tense affair but Elysium is beautiful and she wants to enjoy it. She has reached a point where she no longer thinks of herself as Jane, even calling herself Shepard and there is something fierce about it. It is spit in the face of every useless grunt who snarls that she is_ Earthborn. _That's hard to defend against because it is true. She is less patient when she is called a_ gangslut _but definitely more confused:_ is that something that is actually said? _She is all of twenty-two and just beginning to feel like both a soldier and a grown woman when the Blitz comes down on them. In hours much of the forces stationed at the colony are knocked flat if not outright destroyed. She and a handful of her cohorts are ushering civilians to shelters she is sure won’t be enough._

_Elysium is beautiful and she wants to enjoy it. She pauses, unarmoured and barely armed, and stares out over what she can see of the colony and she decides in a split second that she left Earth for a reason._

_And Shepard is born, well and truly. When she has finished taking command with uncertain but fierce steps, when they have survived the Blitz and she has earned the respect of her comrades and the colonists alike, and when she is done being surprised she is still alive, she protects the lives of the prisoners they take while those with real authority make their slow way to Elysium._

_She barely sleeps, kept awake by fear of retribution from the colonists directed at the batarians hurtling curses at her back. She survives this, too, and only relaxes when Anderson arrives and declares her, in his quiet voice, a hero. Shepard does not cry, but she thanks him and that is the moment they first meet._

_She cuts her hair. She accepts the Star. She submits to N7 training. She wants to pick life over brutality._

_Earth is far behind her._

* * *

 

It is the first time she has left the apartment in days but not the first time that shore leave has started to grate on her. Shepard believes that this is why no one leaves her alone, and why her terminal keeps lighting up with e-mails inviting her out and about. Kaidan, for his part, sends four e-mails and then calls to make sure she is ready to go outside. Shepard snarks that outside is a relative term and she can hear him roll his eyes at her. How far they've come. She grins and leaves apartment to wait for him on the strip.

The lights are blinding and the noise is madness. Her thoughts snark on their own: what's the real difference between the strip and Purgatory? This is unkind, though. There is a life to the strip that lacks the desperation she has been feeling in Purgatory for weeks now. The strip isn't trying to distract its patrons from the war beyond the Citadel (making its slow way towards them), but reminding them of living. Or something like it.

She has been awake for hours but she is still shaking away the vestiges of her restless sleep. Surveying the neon lights, Shepard wonders when the last time she had slept without the nightmare. Earth, she thinks. But isn't certain.

She knows Kaidan is coming before she hears his voice, greeting her with cheer and warmth. She doesn't know how much of that is real. She hopes all of it. When she lowers her chin, her body moving through thick air like maybe she hasn't woken up completely yet, she has to blink away trees: tall and dark and like nothing she has seen in her life. Just in her sleep. She tenses, but it passes, and she manages to smile when Kaidan comes to stand next to her.

"So," Shepard says by way of greeting. "Where to?"

"How much time have you got?"

"Too much," Shepard gripes. Kaidan doesn't quite laugh, but there's a quirk to his mouth that she's familiar with and that she mirrors. "Though," she says, coughing some seriousness into her voice. "I do have dinner with Joker later."

"That'll be fun," Kaidan replies, half-dry, half-earnest.

Shepard hums, then brings the time up on her omni-tool. Another hum. "Running out of daylight here, Alenko."

Kaidan snorts. He leans against the railing and surveys the Strip the same as Shepard had. He looks about as impressed as she is. He shakes his head and tilts his head just enough to look over at her. "You really want to try leaving without her?" Another shake of her head. "Not all of us have death wishes, Shepard."

The rib is familiar and in one memory in her mind she throws back her head and laughs. Now it feels too personal. Now it feels like too much deja vu. She tilts her head and leans against the rail, studying him. Where had they last done this? There's a memory on the tip of her tongue, the dim lights between crew areas on the SR-1. Her heart twists with affection and she opens her mouth to ask what the hell he's talking about when Kaidan pushes himself off the rail and raises an arm in a wave. Shepard turns to look and almost doesn't recognize Ashley as she squirms her irritated way through a collection of Casino-goers.

"Ash," Shepard says, and while she expects herself to sound surprised--horrified--confused, what comes out instead is mostly tired.

Ashley raises an eyebrow. "What?" she says, and looks between them. "Planning on leaving me behind?"

"Like we ever could," Kaidan replies, raising both his hands in obvious surrender.

Then she says something Shepard doesn't catch and he laughs but Shepard hears that from far away and she is sliding backwards.

On Horizon, she remembers them both and their anger. It isn't the first time she's thought of Horizon, which haunts her not only for the colonists lost and melted away before her eyes but for the betrayal in Kaidan's eyes and the jerky anger in his movements. Horizon's memory is a stark reminder of the two years she lost and wasted. It's a memory of the start of a spiral downward, all shattered glass and impatience and rage that really started the moment she woke up in a lab, stitched back together and stumbling towards consciousness, so much a zombie.

Horizon, here, now, and different. They look at her, smiling, and she thinks that the last time she saw them together was Virmire. They had all been hopeful and then one of them had been dead and Shepard had had to wait to grieve--

Ash opens her mouth, laughter dancing around the edges of her lips, but what comes out is pained: " _I would've followed you anywhere, Commander._ "

Shepard knows that this is where apologies start tumbling from her own tongue but she only blinks. She studies Ash and then looks at Kaidan, and the roar of the Strip is almost enough to drown his voice out.

" _How could you put me through that_?"

What, Shepard thinks. She rubs a hand over her face, and banishes the half-memories and Horizon fades away. 

* * *

 

_Eden Prime is burning beneath them but they don't know it yet. Jenkins is vibrating next to her, Alenko is steady but quiet._

_"Amazing, Commander," Jenkins says, his quivering voice raising from a whisper to a hoarse gasp. "This is_ amazing _. Is this how you felt during the Blitz?"_

_Shepard doesn't look at him. She spins her helmet in her hands in a habit that will die with her over Alchera. They haven't seen anything yet, haven't even left the ship and he's already buzzing with adrenaline, staring holes in Nihlus's back and grinning wide and impatient._

_"Let's hope the interesting part of my life is over," she says instead of_ no _. Alenko makes a small huff behind her that might be amusement (_ she knows now it is _) and Jenkins blinks at her. His grin doesn't waver with his confusion, and Shepard has high hopes for this excitable man-child_. _How great it will be, she thinks, to watch this crew grow and to grow alongside them._

_Nihlus takes solitary point and that is the last she sees of him. Everything changes on Eden Prime, and she wonders for the rest of her days what Jenkins would make of the war they fight now. She wonders what Nihlus would do almost as often, takes him as some inspiration for the Spectre she wants to be, but this always ends with the cold realization that she didn't know him. Neither of them ever see the Reapers._

_Neither will Ash, waiting below._


	5. FANTASY

 

 

“She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women”

 

It was a while before anyone thought to breathe, let alone think or plan or move. The crucible's blast had shaken them all and downed comms throughout the system. It wasn't only the Reapers who had floated uselessly above Earth: the Galactic fleet, the culmination of Commander Shepard's work to combat the Reaper Invasion, the evidence of the war that none of them had given up fighting yet, was also frozen. Many considered it a miracle that the blast hadn't killed them, but feared that this meant the Reapers were going to reawaken and resume the harvest once their own systems came online. They didn't. The expectation didn't go away.

The Fifth was the first to regain even partial functionality. John, grateful for the first time since the battle had begun that he hadn't been stationed on Earth but not for the first time to hear the Admiral's voice crackling over the comms, had been one of the first respondents.

The _SSV Rouen_ was a mess, top to bottom. There had been hours where no one had been sure that their life support systems were still up, with crew scrambling and waiting to take their last breath. What had gone first was the artificial gravity, and John had spent a period convincing a twitching Engineer below decks to _just relax_.

His sanity was spiraling down the toilet, and his leadership was going with it.

When the worst of the confusion had slipped into numb muttering, a quiet settled over the ship. John, clutching the Engineer's hand (he didn't even know her name yet, damn it _all_ ), listened to the soft clicks of the _Rouen_ 's core that said the ship was still alive, if barely.

"Lieutenant-Commander," the engineer started in a whisper.

"John will do just fine," he said, and squeezed her hand.

This didn't seem to comfort her. He didn't look at her, instead tilting his head to try and peer down the thin halls of the _Rouen_. Maybe if he focused he could hear other voices, further away. They weren't a large crew, hardly a high-powered frigate, mostly slapped together with whoever was left and willing to fight for the homeworld.

"John," the Engineer finally continued, and John thought about asking her name. She sounded almost angry. "Are we going to die?"

" _Attention crew: systems coming online._ "

John immediately looked up, or what felt like up, at the sound of the airy voice of the ship's VI. He had a moment of relief, and there was a reply on the tip of his tongue for the engineer, and then she released his hand and they dropped.

John landed hard on his knees, wincing. Curses chorused nearby, and the engineer groaned from next to him. He pulled himself slowly to his feet.

" _All decks report!_ "

"The captain," the engineer muttered. "Thank fuck."

"Amen."

She waved away John's hand. He stumbled down the hall, leaning heavily as he peered around a corner.

"Fushikawa," he breathed.

She swore at him, holding herself steady against a wall. Steadier, Sanders--tall and hunched, always--flashed John a grin.

"Looks like we're not dead yet, Sawyer."

John nodded, looked them both over quickly (gratefully), and then threw himself back towards the engineering deck's main console.

"Sir," he said, slapping the comm channel open. "This is Sawyer, on engineering. Fushikawa, Sanders, and--" he paused, mouth gaping open around the unknown engineer's name.

"Raymond," she snapped. "I'm Alicia Raymond."

"...and Raymond, all of us mostly fine."

" _Good_ ," came Howard's voice, crackling. " _Get up here, Sawyer. Raymond, report._ "

"Sir."

John backed out of the way as Raymond took her place by the console. There was something authoritative and borderline possessive about her movements, and he racked his brain trying to remember who else was stationed down here. As far as he could see, nobody.

"John!" Fushikawa called. "We're not done talking." She was standing straight now, the shock of the frozen moments of _Rouen_ apparently passing.

Sanders, hovering over and behind her, nodded his agreement.

John smiled. "Let's figure out what's going on, first."

"At least we're not dead," Fushikawa muttered as he passed her. She and Sanders took their place behind him, and they climbed the squeaking ladder one by one to the upper decks. Raymond didn't spare a glance their way.

The CIC of the _Rouen_ was surrounded by viewscreens that served as windows. Illuminated by their flickering light, Captain Howard had his hands behind his back and was surveying the muted chaos as the _Rouen_ came back to itself.

Howard turned before John said a thing, his eyes flashing over all three of them. His mouth twitched in a gesture that John couldn't read.

"Good to see you, Sawyer," the Captain gruffed, and unhooked his hands. He gestured over the CIC. "We're getting back on our feet."

John nodded and came to stand just behind the Captain, looking over the viewscreens.

"Shit," Fushikawa said softly.

John agreed. His jaw clenched. Just outside the _Rouen_ was a reaper, enormous and darker, even, than the space around it. It was floating slowly passed them, carried by the momentum of some movement they had missed, but otherwise—If John was feeling hopeful, he would say it was dead. It wasn’t only the Reaper. When John had last been in the CIC, standing between Fushikawa and Sanders and feeling both useless and honest-to-goodness terrified, the space around them had been lit up with light and explosions and Earth had swam in and out of focus with the _Rouen_ ’s maneuvering. The battle had been a constant flurry of movement and attempts to remain on one’s feet long enough not to be destroyed by Reaper forces. Fushikawa had wondered aloud whether it would be better to be harvested or simply killed in the climax of the war. Before Howard was able to respond, John had replied: _Shepard’s down there_. To him, that had been enough. Fushikawa hadn’t argued.

Or, she had waited until they were below and away from the Captain’s ears.

Now there was stillness.

This was more familiar to John, raised amongst the stars, never having set foot on Earth. All the same, it was unsettling to see nothing and feeling nothing but stillness. They were quiet witnesses to the unresponsive ships floating around them.

“We’re getting out of here the moment we can,” Howard said, before any of them could voice their worst fears. “Once we have full control.” He cleared his throat and pivoted just so to point his chin towards his comm station. “Raymond?” Authority strengthened his voice.

“ _She’s warming up, sir. We’ll be moving in no time._ ”

"What happened, sir?" John asked, tentatively taking a step closer to his CO. "Did the Crucible--"

"It fired," Howard cut in. "There was a blast."

Yeah. John remembered that much. Fushikawa twitched with obvious impatience. Sanders only sighed.

“We need to see what’s around us,” Howard said, more to himself than them, more a mumble than a statement. This tense, nervous side of Howard was the only one John had come to know over the course of their service together, over the course of the war, though the captain’s ability to work through that same distress had earned John’s respect and admiration several times over. But—and not for the first time—John wondered what his purpose really was as Howard’s XO. He felt _executive_ in name only, and kept from doing the work he was really good at.

 _Shooting things you mean,_ came a voice that sounded too much like his mother for John to be comfortable.

It was at this moment, as the crew of the _Rouen_ began to slip into a stale, nervous state, that Hackett's voice came crackling over the comms. It startled all of them, Howard himself almost jumping out of his own skin.

“ _Is anyone out there?_ ”

John knew, suddenly, that they were the only ones of Sword fleet standing ready. The dangerous field of stationary ships was going to have to come second. None of them could really, honestly believe that the galaxy had ended.

Howard responded, and that was how it began.

* * *

 

Fushikawa was a great pilot. John imagined, in another life, that’s all she would have been: a brilliant, brave woman at the helm of any ship of her choosing (well, almost any; the whole galaxy knew Moreau had Shepard wrapped around his little finger, and therefore the _Normandy_.) Instead, she had developed her biotic talent and thick skin that kept her secrets secret and her ambitions averted. At least, that was Sanders’s theory: Helena Fushikawa was quiet with a purpose.

She flew the shuttle, and it was just the three of them. John didn’t want it any other way.

The Citadel was like a horrendous ghost of itself, still attached to the Crucible. It looked better now than it had closed and John though they had at least that to be grateful for. What compounded the tension was the vision that was the battered Earth shining below them all. It was simultaneously everything he had ever seen in vids, and very much not.

“You’d the Quarians would have figured their shit out by now,” Fushikawa muttered, balancing her fright with frustration.

“Who knows how long ‘by now’ really is,” offered Sanders, sounding almost cheerful.

John glanced at him and managed not laugh at how enormous the combat engineer seemed in the tiny shuttle.

“Long enough for _us_ to get moving!” Fushikawa snapped.

Sanders and John shared a long-suffering glance, then John moved to stand behind Fushikawa.

“Let’s focus,” he said, striving for authoritative. “How long now?”

“Not long,” Fushikawa grumbled, her typical helpful self.

The Citadel loomed. John, distantly, wondered what they would find. He wondered why he was't more afraid.

"What happens when the arms close?" Sanders asked. He made a vague gesture. "You know, inside."

"No clue," John replied. Fushikawa slipped into silence again. John and Sanders followed suit and they remained that way until Fushikawa had cautiously docked.

Geared up, John made the leap from the shuttle doors to the only partially extended dock. There was a moment of freedom while he glided through empty space, quickly replaced by terror that he just barely managed to wrestle down in time to flick on his mag boots. He completed the low arc, feeling sucked to the surface of the dock, and he felt the clang of his boots against the metal all through his bones. But not a sound. He gave himself a slow moment to breathe, and then turned to give his team an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He didn’t wait for their response, and tore the control panel free from next to the door.

It took time and more brute strength than he had expected to pry the door open. When John had dissolved into useless curses, Sanders made his way over as well and it had taken both of their strength to force the doors open. In the dark decontamination chamber, Fushikawa flatly wondered if there was anything left working in the Citadel.

Sanders took over, bringing a panel inside the chamber back to life. With squeaking protest, the doors slid shut behind the three of them. Dim, red emergency lighting came on and then, belatedly, the decontamination process began.

John released a long breath and felt his lungs deflate.

Before the doors opened to the rest of the station, he held up a hand for his team’s attention. He grimaced but forced the words out: “Don’t take off your helmets yet.”

He received only nods in response and there was a gush of artificial air as the pressure finished stabilizing.

John associated the Citadel with bright lights and bright faces. It was a place of prosperity and melding, mingling cultures. Even on the wards, where bright lights was replaced by neon and pulsing music, it was a place that was constantly alive, a bustling civilization unto itself, a mustering point for galactic society. All of that was now replaced by the dim red lighting that, he felt, he had seen two too many times in his lifetime.

“Reminds me of—“ Fushikawa broke off and they took this as their cue to step out of the chamber in unison. John imagined he could hear the wheels turning in her head. “You know. The first attack.”

“We know,” John replied.

Fushikawa clicked her tongue and the sound of it echoed in John’s ears, reverberating around his helmet, mingling with his recycled breathing.

“You were here in 2183?” Sanders prompted.

“Yeah,” Fushikawa replied, and that was all any of them said of the subject.

“Stay close.” John raised his assault rifle and immediately felt his heart rate pick up.

“Like we ever do otherwise.”

They walked for several minutes through empty halls. Their lights flashed over occasional smears of blood but they found nobody living or dead until they stepped out of the docking area and into a humming elevator.

“We need to get to the Tower,” John reminded Sanders. Sanders nodded and the orange of his omni-tool cast a warm light over the red in the elevator. Sanders muttered something to himself that John didn’t catch and then the overhead lights flashed on, blinding them. Fushikawa cursed. John threw his arm over his eyes. Through Sanders’s quiet, panicked apologies, the humming became a soft whine and then silence. A slight vibration remained beneath John’s feet, felt through his boots.

“I think we’re good,” Sanders breathed.

John lowered his arm. His eyes adjusted slowly to the light, just in time for the lights to flash out again. The red emergency lighting resumed.

Fushikawa cursed loudly.

“ _Attention: all civilians are to report to safe zones. The Citadel has entered a low-power state of emergency. Please remain calm._ ”

John raised an eyebrow, automatically looking to the ceiling of the elevator. As reassuring as it was to hear the familiar voice of the Citadel’s VI, there was nothing calming about the message itself beyond her cheery voice.

“The Presidium, please,” he said, and raised his rifle again with more authority than he felt.

Nothing happened.

“ _Access to the Presidium is restricted,_ ” the VI said.

John glanced at Sanders and Fushikawa, incredulous. Through the glare on her helmet John could see an exaggerated roll of Fushikawa’s eyes.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’ll take restricted access over no access.”

The VI apparently took this an instruction, though it took its time. The elevator blipped into life and familiar music began.

“That _fucking_ ding-a-ling garbage is going but the stupid thing can’t get the lights to stay on?”

“Did you just say ‘ding-a-ling’?”

“Go fuck yourself, Sawyer. You want to make fun of my goddamn vocabulary, do it some other time and some other goddamn place.”

Sanders coughed to cover up his laughter.

The elevator slowed to a stop, and the moment of levity vanished.

“Be ready,” John said, quieter than he had wanted. He didn’t know what he was warning them of. He knew he wasn’t ready for whatever was waiting for them on the other side of the elevator doors.

They were greeted by a hundred peering faces, their terror obvious. John’s stomach dropped, his mouth fell open, and for a moment all he could do was stare in wonder at the survivors gathered in front of them.

“Spirits,” gasped a turian near the elevator, towering over all three of them. “Someone’s come.” His subvocals crackled in John’s helmet with an underlying squeak that grated on John’s ears, straining his translator. John’s heart thudded and sympathy overwhelmed him.

He lowered his rifle and stepped out of the elevator.

“Holy shit,” Fushikawa finally said.

The crowd erupted with noise then, a combination of wails and excited yelling that deafened John until he pulled his helmet off and the sensitive speakers finally stopped assaulting his ears.

Fushikawa teetered on the edge of violent frustration, and John was wary of her firing shots on an unstable space station.

“ _Sawyer,_ ” she hissed behind him, and she sounded artificial without the direct-link between their helmets filtering her voice to him in all of its harsh clarity. “Put your _fucking helmet on_!”

“She’s right John,” came Sanders’s panicked whisper, his voice crackling through its own filter. “We don’t know what’s happening yet—“

John raised a hand to them both and they felt silent, or mostly so in Fushikawa’s mumbling case. John took a step forward and slapped his rifle onto its magnetic holster against the small of his back. He raised his arms, took a deep breath, and then attempted the very best impersonation of his mother that he could manage.

“Alright!” he roared. His voice cracked. Only those closest to him quieted, staring with wide eyes and open mouths and wheezing through envirosuits.

John cleared his throat.

“Nice, sir,” Sanders said flatly, sounding so much like Fushikawa John was sure she was going to celebrate right there and then.

“Real fucking nice,” Fushikawa chimed in, pride making her voice light.

John cleared his throat again. “Alright! Everyone! Can I have everyone’s attention!” The buzzing of the crowd didn’t stop. He grunted. He swallowed. “NOW!”

The silence was so sudden he heard his own voice echoing throughout the presidium that he couldn’t quite see. A thousand eyes seemed to zero in on him at once and John froze. What now? He clenched his jaw, thoughts racing. He had questions, so many questions—and yet, not as many as he was sure these people had. _How many of them were there? What had happened when the arms closed? Did they know what had been happening outside?_

On his next inhale, John caught the sharp, confused scent of intermingled blood. He swallowed.

“Look, we’re going to get you all help. But right now my team and I—“ he gestured clumsily behind him at Sanders and Fushikawa, who both straightened at the address. “—we need to get to the Tower. We need to find Shepard. We need her to tell us what happened.” _If she’s alive_ , he didn’t add.

The only reply was further silence, and then a whisper through the crowd: _Shepard Shepard Shepard Shepard_.

Hope and anxiety blossomed in his chest. John was certain he would vomit if he moved. If he breathed.

“Have any of you seen her?” His voice barely carried.

A volus shuffled forward, wheezing and limping. “None of us know what has happened. Earth Clan, please—“

A wellspring of strength he didn’t know was there opened within John and he raised his hand again, silence the volus with authority John was borrowing from somewhere else.

“I wish I could stay and explain,” he said.

"There's way too much happening outside the Citadel for me to properly do that. But I promise you, there _will be others after us_. Now please, let us through if you can't help us."

"If the Commander is in the Tower, her safety cannot be guaranteed." A trembling Salarian, just behind the volus spoke up then. His voice quavered. "We haven't heard or seen anyone from the Tower since--" He broke off abruptly, and shook his head.

John considered this. His ears buzzed. With sudden certainty, he dropped his helmet and cracked his knuckles. "We're going," he said.

The crowd parted then. Sanders nudged John between his shoulder blades, gentle and encouraging, and the three of them were off. None of the crowd said a word.

As they walked they found more survivors, and then bodies—Reaper and otherwise. John wondered if they had been corralling those they didn’t kill. His mouth went dry at the suspicion, and he forced himself to halt his train of thought until all he could hear in his brain was a steady one-two count of his footsteps.

Another elevator. They stood in silence this time, listening to the incessant music. No commentary from the AI this time. What more could it say, anyway? Another reminder that the whole galaxy was going to shit and nowhere was that more obvious than the _goddamn Citadel_? As the elevator slowed to a stop, John realized he didn't know what was on the other side of the doors. Certainly, he had visited the presidium before. He considered himself semi-familiar with the Citadel as a whole. But the Tower? That wasn't a place for men like him. Grunts.

Everything was upside down.

The emergency lighting in the Tower seemed closer to a dark rose than a proper red. There was a pulsing to it as well that set John’s teeth on edge, and the air felt tighter. He almost wished he had kept his helmet on.

Close quarters. Heavy breathing.

He unhooked his pistol this time, raising it and continuing forward with grim determination. The only other creatures in the Tower that they could see were the Keepers, scuttling to and fro and making light chittering sounds that John had never heard before. None of them acknowledge the team’s presence. John heard the occasional huff of breath from Fushikawa and Sanders behind him, like they had something they wanted to say, but none of the three of them said a word.

There must have been people here when the arms closed, when the Reapers had _literally taken_ the Citadel to Sol. To Earth. There was no sign of anyone now, not a smear of blood or a toppled chair. What about the council? He wanted to hope they hadn’t been her, but where else would the leaders of the galaxy be at a time of great conflict? Where else could they be in the middle of the fucking apocalypse? He both desperately needed and was dreadfully afraid of finding even a trace of them.

Of Shepard.

His thoughts danced around her. He focused, counting his breaths and then his steps again as they carried on their slow way towards the Tower proper. A wayward glance upwards showed him the dominating shadow of Crucible, lording above them like a specter of the hope they had all had. The great weapon. What had it done, while John and his squad had been below decks, squabbling like children and dealing with his borderline familial issues? What had happened to the entire fleet—Sword, Shield, Reaper—human, asari, turian, _geth and quarians_ —all the symbols of everything that Shepard had accomplished in the name of pure survival?

As they came closer to the set of stairs leading up to the council chambers at the head of the tower, the chittering from the Keepers grew louder and more incessant. The Keepers themselves remained distracted by their work, such as it was, not even turning their beady eyes on the trio. They started up the stairs, weapons raised.

"Do you hear that?" Sanders whispered then, and his voice crackled in the air, startling both John and Fushikawa.

"Hear what?" Fushikawa hissed.

They didn't stop.

"That--humming. It's kind of in my teeth." John heard Sanders crack his jaw experimentally, in a gesture that was normally disgusting but was now mostly disarming.

"Keep an eye on that," John said. “That—feeling.”

"Very specific. Both of you." Fushikawa's snark was unsteady, however. John wondered if both of them were starting to feel what Sanders was describing, or if it was just nervous projection.

The pulsing of the lighting continued as they crested the stairs.

At first, there didn't seem to be much to look at.

"Fushikawa," he said. "Watch the Keepers, but stay close."

"Sir."

"There's something over there," Sanders said, his anxiety making him breathless. The man was expressive, but always steady. John was suddenly, fiercely glad that both he and Fushikawa were here.

“I know,” was all John replied.

At the heart of the Tower was the main console, the place where Saren Aeterius had begun his sabotage and conquest of the Citadel. John had never understood how something so important could even exist in a single point on the station, but there was a clue now with the Crucible high above. The mound at the far end of the platform, however, bore no similarities to any console John had seen. A full minute past before one of them realized what made it different.

Fushikawa broke in to a string of impressive cursing.

John inhaled and flinched at the smell: something sickly sweet, and then burnt, and a distinct floral scent that had him fighting his gag reflex. The three of them stopped and Fushikawa, in a rare moment of willing physical contact, grabbed John's elbow. He felt her fingers trembling against him and he took the chance to look away and back at her.

"Let's go back," she said, her voice crackling through her helmet.

John looked at her for longer than he would later admit to. Sanders said his name softly and jarred him from his thoughts, and John turned back towards the mound of wiring and the flashing red light within it.

"Stay here," he said, and knew the moment the words left his mouth that neither of them were going to listen.

"Fuck," Fushikawa said with feeling.

Pistol raised and breath held, John carried forward. Fushikawa was hot on his heels, and then came Sanders with a touch more resistance. Their footsteps sounded muffled to John’s ears. The smell kept threatening to knock him flat on his back, while adrenaline forced him to stay upright.

“What the hell—“ Sanders broke off, choking.

“Shit. Fucking shit fuck.”

Both Fushikawa and Sanders took a stuttered step back, but John was rooted to the spot. Wrapped in a cocoon of wires, something pulsed a dark red light in time with the emergency lighting all around them. It was hypnotic. It drew the eye. John felt his heart begin to slow in time with the pulsing, his eyelids being dragged into its rhythm.

But inevitably, he looked at the thing beneath it.                                                                                            

Limbs splayed unnaturally, bright eyes staring vacantly at a spot above John’s head, and chords twisted all about and perhaps within it.  It was unmistakably human. Bright, thin wires wound around the face, slipping between the skin. He could see the starts of the wires, like a glimmer beneath water, before it faded into the rest of her body.

“It’s her,” Fushikawa snapped, her voice rising to a pitch John had never heard from her. She hit his arm with the back of her hand, jolting him. “Isn’t it? _Isn’t it_?”

John lowered his pistol.

He couldn’t stop staring.

“Oh no,” was all Sanders managed out, his deep voice sounding strained and quiet.

There was the humming.

Fushikawa snarled something unintelligible and then stomped the remaining distance. She was shaking, and John knew too late what she wanted to do.

“Fushikawa!”

With a trembling hand and a string of curses slipping passed her lips, Fushikawa reached to shift the wires just enough to reveal a black chest plate beneath them. The N7 stamp was stark.

Apparently disgusted, she pulled back.

“Well,” she drawled, clenching her hands into fists to hide their shaking. “I suppose there could be another N7 wandering around the Citadel Tower in the middle of the most ridiculous galactic conflict ever seen.”

“Helena,” John said, low and warning—but against what, he wasn’t sure.

"Honestly, just-- _fuck_." Fushikawa tore her helmet free, her oxygen hissing into the air for a moment, the tube dangling free at her back before it was automatically wound back into her armour. She tossed the helmet away from her, jaw clenched so tightly John could _hear_ her teeth grinding against each other. She took a deep breath, and then John blinked and Fushikawa was bent over her knees, vomit the yellow colour of their rations slapping against the platform.

" _Helena_." Sanders was at her side in a moment.

She slapped his hands away and wiped the vomit from the edges of her mouth. For a moment, she glared up at John, as though he had done something unforgivable--and John wondered if, just maybe, he had.

A strangled, almost-scream left Fushikawa and she pivoted with a screech of her boot against the platform to kick at the exposed leg of Commander Shepard.

John flinched, started to look away from it, when they all heard the shuddering, wheezing breath the Commander took.

They froze.

More vomit hit the platform, Fushikawa cursing around it. 

* * *

 

"I can't shake the feeling that something is happening."

Joker looks at her, sipping with surprising elegance at his drink. The promised umbrella, bright yellow with a floral design even Shepard finds impressive, dangles from her fingertips. Joker lowers the drink and snatches the umbrella from her. Shepard makes a point of rolling her eyes, but he ignores her.

"You mean," he says, with a graveness that tells her whatever is about to leave his mouth is going to frustrate her. "Like an ongoing invasion or something?”

She raises an unimpressed eyebrow. Joker takes a long drink and looks away.

"Where the hell is our food?" he mutters, a substitute for innocent whistling.

Shepard just shakes her head and taps at the table. "What did you want to talk about?"

Joker studies his empty glass, and then looks at her again. "Uh," he says.

Shepard's other eyebrow goes up. "Spit it out, Moreau."

They stare at each other for a moment. Then, as Joker opens his mouth to reply the pieces fall together in Shepard's brain.

"Oh," she says, remembering. "You didn't send that message."

"No, _you_ did, Commander. Williams laughed her ass off at the thought of us in the place and I figured she was just jealous you weren't bringing _her_ here." He begins to mutter at the table. "Of course it's some bad guy bringing us both to the same place. Probably to kill you. I hope they let me get out of the way first."

Shepard is only half-listening. "Williams?" she says absently, looking over the busy restaurant.

"Uh, yeah. You remember Ash right? The second human Spectre? Or is it third. Have she and Alenko flipped a coin yet?"

"Ah," Shepard says, and slumps against the back of her chair. She folds her arms. "Brooks."

Joker twists in his seat, looking towards the waving young woman across the restaurant. "Who?"

"Doesn't matter," Shepard sighs, and closes her eyes.

* * *

 

_Saren is dead. Sovereign is in pieces and, presumably, also dead. The Citadel picks up the pieces and puts itself back together like next to nothing happened, though she still sees fear in some eyes. And then what she can only call a cover-up begins. If they want to banish her, send her away to hunt unimportant Geth, fine. She will. She'll play her cards and she'll be waiting in the wings for the day that none of them can deny the truth of what happened when Sovereign came. She has time._

_She wants her team to be the best it can. Wrex fights her, wanting to stay close but she doesn't believe him and he is the first to leave. Then, Garrus -- come back, she tells him, as an equal. She doesn't need to tell him she already thinks of him as such, but she does need to tell him to carry on through and earn a status that will make their war legitimate. She thinks of how he should have been a Spectre years ago when she needs to light an angry fire under her ass, and she thinks of how proud she'll be when he earns it to keep hope warm in her chest._

_So, Garrus goes._

_Ashley is already gone. She familiarizes herself with a new Tennyson poem each evening before the rest she allows herself. It is the closest to a prayer she can get for the friend she left behind. Ash is a wide chasm between her and Kaidan, though she's grateful for the days that Kaidan is brave enough to take her hand or just cast her a warm smile._

_Tali makes plans to leave, both eager and terrified to return to the fleet. When they sit and talk, heads close in the mess and Tali's suit's speakers crackling with her excitement, pride is overwhelming. There is a deep affection between them that they are both afraid to say goodbye to, but they are both too aware of and too prepared to face what comes next._

_Liara wishes to stay indefinitely and she is hard to argue with. Is there any denying that the_ Normandy _would be her best place to grow, to blossom into the warrior she is becoming?_

_Jane waits for the day that they will all be together again at the same that she dreads it. She is certain that they are laying the groundwork for a resistance, for a war rather than a harvest._

_She dies, burning and suffocating._


	6. HOPING

“My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.”

Benjamin Wood, _The Bellwether Revivals_

 

_And why not leave her dead?_

_Death seemed more than enough. She hopes Ash experienced and will experience none of it. It was a baseless cruelty, to imagine dragging Ash’s ghost from its rest. She knew better now, selfish, horrible woman that she was. What right did she have to even dream of what she could do of what she has already done of what she will do if we are not careful_ how she had hoped—

_The first memory in her new life is of pain. She hits the ground hard and cries out, pain shooting through her. In this first moment, Jane does not know that she has died or that she has been resurrected. She knows nothing but her flight response, but the hard-pressed anger that raises her from the ground more than any of the medication or reconstruction could have._

_So she gets up. And what she finds on the far side of her new wakefulness is more pain, more confusion, and what she can only describe as yearning: where is her team, her ship, her family; how much did she lose?_

_Everything, they tell her in many more words._

_The anger boils into rage, and it keeps her from seeing at first how lucky she is to have both Miranda and Jacob from the start. The rage at first keeps her from voicing the thought out loud, as well:_ why not leave her dead?

_She doesn’t want to be alive but here she is so she fights. She is reckless. She is afraid. She is fire._

_Then she sees Tali, and Jane is floored by the authority in her voice and the bravery that holds her so straight and tall. Tali is a beacon of hope in this afterlife Jane is being subjected to, brought into against her will. Tali is a reminder that two years lost is not two years of her life but two years of a fight._

_The rage grows. Hope grows with it._

* * *

 

Liara's tea fills the kitchen with a calming, almost minty smell. It is some blend of her own that she had excitedly tried to describe to Shepard, but Shepard remembers little of the conversation. What she does remember is that the smell alone is enough to waft away some of the pain in her lower back and shoulders. The bed is too soft, she tells herself. Staying still is making her aware of all kinds of bodily harm she hadn't had time to think about before, she tells herself. Everyone notices. Everyone makes suggestions. Shepard ignores all but some. Her squad, long-suffering, roll their eyes at her but leave her to inhale the smell of Liara's tea even if she won't drink the stuff.

Tali, on some level and for some reason, thinks this new ritual of Shepard's is hilarious. Shepard, on some level, tricks her into staying at the apartment by maintaining the ritual late into the night cycle, though it's hard to tell what time it is with the lights of the Strip always shining through the enormous windows.

Tali takes a whiff of the latest cup. Liara, in passing, warns them both not to waste it. Garrus, following, snarks something that Shepard doesn't hear but it elicits a groan from her all the same.

"This is nice," Tali says, leaning on the eating counter with Shepard. "Shore leave."

Shepard hums her agreement, but something like dread settles in the pit of her stomach.

They study the steaming mug together for a time, and then Shepard sits up and stretches out her neck and back. There is some satisfying popping.

"Shepard," Tali says.

For a moment, Shepard is almost afraid to look at her. She looks instead beyond the kitchen, to where Liara and Garrus's shadows dance against the ground with their animated talk. They are alive and well and she trusts this without having to peer around the corner. If she turns around, she will see Tali and she _will_ hear the often unnoticeable hum of her friend's envirosuit.

"Yeah?" Shepard says, and she is smiling when she finally looks back at Tali.

She doesn't need to see under Tali's helmet to know the smile isn't returned.

"Does this seem right to you? All of us here. Happy."

Shepard blinks. She picks up the mug of tea and takes a long sniff. She sighs.

"It's nice, like you said," she replies. Garrus and Liara's voices grow louder but she can't catch what they're saying. Her smile grows. "It doesn't matter if it's right or not."

Tali _hmm_ 's and the crackly sound of it is comforting. "You're probably right," she teases, and Shepard laughs.

* * *

 

_A suicide mission suits Jane just fine until it doesn't, until she walks through the SR-2 and manages not to see the once incessant ghosts of the SR-1, and manages not to hear Kaidan's admonishments on Horizon in every step she takes. It takes time, all the time they have. It is the moment when she steps out of the elevator, leaving Garrus conspicuously behind her, and no-one bats an eyelash, that she realizes how badly she wants them all to live. The pact she had made with herself suddenly matters less than guiding this team through the fire and getting them all out again._

_She trusts Garrus and Tali above anyone else, and she trusts them to have the backs of the entire team. She proves this, beyond the Omega-4 relay. She proves her willingness to live and fight. She demands the same from each member of her squad, and inspires it, and they are successful._

(Later, she wonders if it was too late to matter.)

 

* * *

 

(Let them all be safe.)

Shepard allows Tali to talk her into rewatching _Fleet and Flotilla_ , like Shepard had missed some great Thing the first time around. Liara joins them. Joker and James arrive just in time, uninvited. Garrus is as unabashedly excited as Tali. Later, Traynor complains that she missed it and they plan another movie night. Shepard does not wonder once where they will find the time for that, and she does not think of the war beyond the safety of her warm and friend-filled apartment.

This is all she wants.

 

* * *

 

_She makes a promise to herself in the seconds after her first meeting with the Illusive Man: she will live this second life, she will earn it, she will repay this debt to Cerberus by doing the only thing she really wants to do. If it means saving lives, she is willing to give just about anything. She is willing to surrender her whole self._

_After the Collector Base, after the Bahak System, after she watches Liara take on the heavy burden of the Shadow Broker's mantle—much of her changes, again. The rage is still hot within, but it has taken on new purpose._

_Jane swears to herself that she will make the most of this second chance Cerberus has thrust upon her. She will not fail again._

* * *

_Bahak is a failure. She wakes in pain and terror, again, and for the first time since the Collector Base Jane lets the anger fuel her and it sharpens her attention. This is her first real mission as an Alliance soldier again, and she has fantasies of returning to Earth and allowing herself to be celebrated as a hero. She has come back from the edge of the abyss and she has turned her back on death and—_

Fuck _, she thinks again and again._ Fuck.

_Bahak is brutal and she is made a butcher and it breaks her in a thousand ways she’ll never recover from._

_So she punishes herself, and she prepares herself._

* * *

 

Is she still human? Did enough of her humanity survive the fire and the cold?

* * *

 

She couldn't have a service in the apartment so she leaves, and they come with her. Thane offers her his silent company and she takes him on it, and they stand side by side. Shepard wants a moment to apologize, to offer some hint of tears to the friend they have all lost. A life snuffed out before it has begun, truly. That is the great shame of this war, and she is terrified of continuing to fight it though she can't bring herself to say the words out loud.

"It isn't as bad as it seems," Joker says to her from a bench as they pass him. There is stillness on the Presidium. They are alone, the four of them, and Shepard is grateful.

She stops.

"Shepard," Thane prompts.

Joker looks up at her. He prods at the beak of his hat and smiles.

"Joker," Shepard starts, and stops there. She wants to keep moving but there are things to be said. Her chances are dwindling. "Why am I here?" she asks instead, and looks to Thane for an answer.

"What do you mean?" he asks, and she is startled by the question.

"I promise it'll be fine, Commander," Joker says, and he waves her on.

Shepard hesitates. "I don't want nightmares," she insists. She knows she sounds angry. She hates herself for it. She looks away.

What does she have to be angry about?

Joker does not join them as they lower EDI's empty body into the Presidium lake and Shepard questions a thousand decisions she has made and unmade.

"You can always choose again," Thane promises her, and EDI disappears into blackness. "A nightmare is a dream, Shepard."

"I am in control," Shepard reminds herself, and her voice echoes around them. 

"Yes," Thane promises.

* * *

 

"Shepard."

She opens her eyes. Drowsiness makes her feel heavy, glued to her spot on the couch. Something smells delicious.

"Who's in my kitchen now?" she grumbles, but she can't help her smile.

EDI stands between the coffee table and the couch, looking down at her.

"The usual crowd," EDI promises. "I suggest breakfast, Commander."

"Of course you do," Shepard says, and pulls her creaking body to its feet.

And although she is smiling, she feels tears choking her and is amazed when she and EDI walk side-by-side towards the kitchen.

She is left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think this is my favourite chapter and i don't know why


	7. MENACE

“…but in the moment that he did it he was thinking: _here is someone still alive_. And the word _alive_ was amazing.”

Timothy Findley, _The Wars_

 

It seemed impressively wrong that they would find Jane Shepard like this, in the flashing light and muted chaos of a disabled Citadel. It was just plain fucked up that she would still be living when they did, breathing and looking up at him.

"Shit," Sanders sighed.

"Yeah," John agreed.

"We can't leave her like this," Fushikawa gasped. In a rare show of weakness, she dropped on her ass and groaned, staring up at the ceiling as though resolutely working not to see her own vomit. "We can't."

"Of course not."

"Sawyer," she snapped, and he flinched.

John looked over his shoulder at her. "What?"

" _We can't leave her like this._ "

"You think I don't know that?"

"What Helena means, I think," Sanders ventured, holding out his hands placatingly. John tensed. He straightened his back, and realized that he had set himself between Shepard and his team. Sanders didn't continue.

So be it, John thought. His stomach rolled over. He imagined himself bent at the waist, bile dripping from his lips.

He couldn't shake the image. He didn't move.

The humming was a ringing in his ears. His teeth were vibrating with it. He wanted to slap himself. He shook out his arms instead.

"What?" he said, and lifted his chin in challenge. "What does she mean, Sanders?"

"We can't let her be found like this," Sanders finished. He almost looked like he regretted saying it.

The thing behind him took a creaking, wheezing breath. John didn't blink.

"Tell me, what exactly do _you_ mean by that?"

"He means one of us needs to put her out of her goddamn misery, Sawyer." Fushikawa shifted as though she wanted to stand. She swallowed audibly, and then gave up with a hissed: " _Fuck_. _Fuck_ my _fucking_ legs. No, I’m goddamn fine Sanders—“

Sanders shook his head, straightening from his almost-crouch, his almost-offer of help.

“No,” John said, defiant.

Sanders grimaced. "John--"

"Was something about that not clear? _No_."

"Look at her, John. How would we even get her out of there?"

"She isn't even tracking you with her eyes," Fushikawa muttered. She was still looking straight up, the line of her throat exposed.

John wondered, briefly, if he was starting to hate her.

"She's breathing," he said.

"That's not living."

"Fine," John snapped, and there was a momentary flash of relief on Sanders's face. "Let's get her out of there and see if she starts living."

"Get her-- _John_."

"Don't touch that stuff!"

"It's the goddamn Citadel! What do you think is going to happen?"

"You'll get sucked in there and maybe you'll get your chance to _die with your goddamn sister._ "

"Helena," Sanders warned, low and barely loud enough to hear.

"Jason," she taunted.

"Both of you shut up!"

In unison, they looked to him.

Adrenaline had John's skin feeling hot beneath his armour.

"We're not killing Commander Shepard."

"That's not her, Sawyer," Fushikawa said. "Not really."

"And how do you know that? Let me tell you: you just don't." John gestured wildly behind him, not quite ready to look at the mess of wires that was Shepard. "Taunt or insult me as much as you want Fushikawa--I'm not killing her like this. I'm not going to let you two do it, either. This is Commander fucking Shepard, and more than anything we need her to tell us what the hell happened. We're bringing her back to Hackett. End of story."

"You think she's going to say anything at all? Just look at her, Sawyer!"

" _End of the fucking story!"_

He was yelling before he really heard himself, and the chittering of the Keepers was suddenly louder than his own heartbeat. The three of them froze, staring at one another. Sanders turned slowly to look at the Keepers behind them, but they remained at their stations.

Fushikawa rolled onto one hip and threw up again, choking on what was left in her stomach. John wondered—dimly, briefly—if the humming had made its way into her spine, too. If the watering of Sanders’s eyes was caused by the incessant _noise—_

They needed to go.

"We're getting out of here," John growled. His eyes were huge in their sockets, feeling like they were about to burst out of his skull. Breath held tightly in his chest, John spun on heel and turned back towards the mess of wires that was Jane Shepard. His stomach flipped over and he fought back a wave of nausea as he inhaled the rotting stench of whatever had happened to her. The wires quivered as she took in another shaky breath, her thin lips parted just enough to suck in air. Her hair dangled around the cables around her hair, loose and stark.

"All of us," he breathed, and reached for her.

His fingertips had barely brushed the surface of the cables when Shepard's jaw dropped. John saw a flash of her teeth, the shape of her tongue and the stretch of her lips around the shape of her mouth. He had a moment to think _oh_ before she began to scream.

It was unnatural. It was piercing.

Fushikawa's latest string of curses was drowned out almost immediately by the Keepers, their chittering becoming a high-pitched whine. John stumbled back from Shepard, covering his ears. When he glanced back, he saw the Keepers had thrown their heads back. Their long necks stretched and straightened, grotesque, stiff shapes becoming a mockery of the hunched things John had always seen them as.

Sanders turned his wide eyes on John. Fushikawa rolled onto her knees, covering her ears and shutting her eyes against the noise.

"Sawyer!" John heard her call. He spun back towards Shepard, pulling his hands from his ears.

" _John!"_

"Holy fucking shit," John gasped out, and grasped the largest of the cables, wound around Shepard's head like a brutal crown. Pain shot through his arms, his palms burning, and he cried out as pulled.

For a moment, nothing moved. John's ears and hands burned. Fushikawa and Sanders cried out incoherently behind him. Shepard's eyes stared past him. Then, the wiring holding her began to give way and John lifted it from her head. Gasping out his relief, he released the cabling and reached for her shoulders.

Abruptly the screaming stopped.

The cocoon of light above her head collapsed into a scattering of wires around her shoulders.

The chittering of the Keepers resumed, and there was a click as Shepard closed her mouth.

John stumbled back, hissing and clutching his hands close to his chest.

"John!" Sanders scrambled forward, the knees of his armour screaming against the platform. He pulled John's hands from his chest and together they pried the armoured gloves away.

"Shit!" Fushikawa roared, and then dissolved into coughing. " _What_ is that smell! What is this shit!"

John's claw clenched. "Shut up or help!" he snapped over his shoulder, and hissed as the last pieces of his gloves were pried from his skin.

Sanders made a soothing sound that made John simultaneously want to kiss and punch him. He settled for pulling away and starting towards Shepard again.

" _John_ ," Sanders warned.

"Same applies to you, Jason," John sighed and stretched his fingers. He didn't want to look at his palms.

He looked over the mess of the woman before him. It felt already like his mind was transposing a very different image of her over what was actually happening. He swallowed. His determination burned within as much as his hands had burnt without.

"Time to move," he said, hushed. Blood roared in his ears.

John reached into the wires, slipped his hands under her splayed arms, and began the arduous task of pulling her free.

He wouldn't leave his sister to die.

* * *

 

John Shepard was also born in Vancouver in 2154, his mother aided by a University of British Columbia medical student at the UBC general hospital, where only one hundred and twelve more babies would be born before the maternity ward was shut down and operations shifted between other hospitals throughout the sprawling metropolis of downtown Greater Vancouver. Not that John could really picture what that looked like. It’s his origin story: Earthborn John, who remembers nothing of the homeworld’s sky or ocean. The gift this gave him is simple: he has never needed anything but the stars. He was his own hero in the making, a true space cadet. It was all he ever wanted.

Both his parents were Alliance marines. When he was eleven, his mother made Captain of the _SSV Vimy Ridge,_ a frigate that John built a thousand models of until it was decommissioned in his teens and he and his mother retired to a quiet colony where they buried his father.

When John turned eighteen, he enlisted. His mother told him not to look back and when he was among the stars again, he felt for the first time in years that he could breathe.

Imagine his surprise when he heard there was another Shepard in the navy. 

* * *

His adoption had never been a secret. His mother imparted a pride in his last name, in this history that he had only a piece of. He spent nearly a year trying to cultivate resentment towards her.

He couldn't explain how he knew. He only had to look at her once.

"Mom," he said at twenty. "I'm going to take dad's name."

Her disappointment had been palpable, even through the comm. But she let him make his decisions.

And John Shepard became John Sawyer. And Jane Shepard became a legend.

His pride grew.

At twenty-four he met Fushikawa and Sanders, and they became inseparable. They became a do-it-all team.

They knew they could always do more. How many times had Fushikawa accused him of floundering in his almost-sister's shadow?

John thought this was bullshit. Knew it was bullshit.

Being assigned under Howard's command was an opportunity. The war was an opportunity.

He wasn't sure he could take it.

* * *

 

Below decks on the _Rouen_.

John was affecting disinterest, turning his back to Fushikawa and gazing down the thin hall that made up the entirety of the _Rouen_ 's engineering deck. They weren't a large crew. Just large enough to cause trouble where it was needed, and the Reaper's needed all the trouble they could get.

The three of them were doling out exactly none of that trouble.

Fushikawa was restless.

John was restless.

Sanders was exhausted, looking between them as though he knew what was about to come--and how could he not? how many arguments had he witnessed already, over years of service together? They were a team, a squad. They were John's friends and comrades, more than anyone else in the entire navy. They were on the edge of becoming an independent squad, a useful crew in their own right, and then the war broke out and really, they should have all known it was coming. They had been warned.

"Yeah, fuck us," Fushikawa snapped, tossing her hands in the air in exasperation. The roll of her eyes that followed was so exaggerated John found himself hoping they would get stuck that way. "Fuck the entire fucking galaxy because we couldn't listen to Commander Fucking Shepard. Curses! How could we ignore an angel from on high!"

John's face was hot. "You want to head back up there and take a look at what we're facing, huh? You want to tell me that the entire fucking galaxy wasn't rolling around in their own festering stupidity for the last two years?"

"Guys," Sanders pleaded, stretching his arms between them.

They continued around him.

"You really want to know what I want, Sawyer? I want you to let go of this hero worship turned pseudo-incestuous obsession!"

" _Excuse me_?"

"Well, at least your manners are in tact," Sanders muttered.

They both rounded on him then, mouths wide and eyes flashing.

Sanders raised his hands in self-defense, but the scowl on his face caught both John and Fushikawa off-guard.

"What?" Sanders drawled, uncharacteristically gruff. "You two going to yell at _me_ for being ridiculous in the middle of a battle?"

Fushikawa snarled at him, but turned away. John could only stare for a moment, before he turned and all but stormed away.

"Lieutenant-Commander," the young engineer called then, poking her head and eyeing him blankly.

He paused, almost tripping. He stared at her, then belatedly: "Yeah?"

She blinked, and he had the vague sense that he had disappointed her. He forced himself to straighten up.

"Could you come here for a moment, sir?"

And she ducked back away.

John, bewildered, looked towards Fushikawa and Sanders. Neither were looking in his direction.

And just as he spurred himself into motion, all hell broke loose.

* * *

 

Was he obsessed? He wished he could call his mother, but--

The war had taken many things. He didn't want it to take a hero before he'd had the chance to know her.

All he wanted was a chance and all he wanted was to flee from every opportunity to make good on one.

* * *

 

Shepard wasn't a large woman but she was heavy. Fushikawa's theory, spat between curses, was that she was filled with Cerberus _and_ Reaper tech. John and Sanders both ignored her, and communication dissolved quickly into the occasional grunt from them as they hoisted Shepard between them.

The crowds below seemed to hold their breath as they passed through.

" _It's Shepard_ ," John heard.

" _It's her. It's really her._ "

" _And the council_ \--?"

Shepard's breathing was a wheezing whistle in his right ear.

Help was waiting, Hackett himself striding into view. The Citadel survivors erupted in a dull roar of noise and questions and, maybe, hope.

"It's her," Hackett said, and John nodded. Shepard was lifted from their arms in moments.

Hackett turned his eyes on John, and John realized belatedly who exactly was standing before him. Sanders was outright vibrating.

"Any sign of the Council, Sawyer?"

John hesitated, all too aware of the buzz of voices around him—authoritative calls broke through, corralling the survivors. Someone would get answers shortly, and John—His eyes darted passed the admiral, following the group now responsible for Shepard. They talked in low, urgent tones to one another. John couldn’t hear a word.

"No, sir," John replied. "But the Keepers were acting strangely."

"The Keepers?"

"Yeah," John replied dully. "The Keepers."

Shepard was already out of sight.

" _Rebooting all systems,_ " came the VI's cool voice, and a hush fell over them all. " _Please do not be alarmed._ "

It's her, John thought, helpless.

The emergency lighting flickered out, leaving them all in a moment of pitch black that stopped a hundred hearts, before the blazing white light that was so much more natural to the Presidium burst around them. John covered his eyes with an arm. Fushikawa swore loudly behind him, and Sanders told her, slightly less loud, to shut up.

"Well, Lieutenant-Commander," Hackett said then, and John had the sensation he wasn't actually being addressed. "The hardest part of a war is the aftermath. Let's get started."

"Aftermath?" John echoed, and then cleared his throat, reluctant to look at the admiral. "Sir, how do we know it's actually over?"

When he finally met Hackett's eyes, there was barely a shift in the man's expression; just a slow blink.

"Did you see her, Sawyer?" Hackett said. "We'd better hope it's over."

John wondered if Hackett could smell her.

"Sir," he said, resolve making his chest tight. "I'd like to look after her."

Hackett raised both eyebrows. John swallowed.

" _What_?" Fushikawa hissed.

"Are you a doctor, Lieutenant-Commander?" Hackett asked, composed and calm.

"No, sir," John replied, and straightened, throwing back his shoulders and lifting his chin just so. "But I can keep her safe."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story, like all my writing really, owes a great debt to The Wars. i would like to be able to convince you all to read it.
> 
> and this is the third piece of amazing art from the magnificent frogmakesart!!


	8. WAR

“Perfect understanding between beings is no guarantor of happiness. To perfectly understand another’s madness, for instance, is to be mad oneself. The veil that separates earthly beings is, at times, a tragic barrier, but it is also, at times, a great kindness.”

Andre Alexis, _Fifteen Dogs_

 

_The first days of her incarceration are spent in casual silence. She endures her trial. She endures her sentencing. She endures the barrage of reminders of what she has done. She continues, as she has done for too long now, to fight to have her voice heard, and every opportunity she gets is one more to save the galaxy._

_Or something along those lines. She hates being back on Earth. She hates being back in Vancouver. She thinks, sometimes, about what could happen if she could leave and wander the streets. What would she see? What would be different?_

_Lieutenant Vega is a constant presence, and a sometimes companion. He seems impossibly young to her. A small part of her wants to see him action, to see what this colourful young man is capable of beyond stubborn salutes to a woman who no longer holds rank in his military._

_She spends a solid week thinking about Kaidan, almost pining for a familiar, friendly face. She wants to know how he is. Where he is. What he has been doing. She wants to pick up the pieces of Horizon but she can't leave her room let alone make a call. She romanticizes it, picks and chooses the things he might say that would let their friendship grow again, like things would just slip back into place and two years would vanish._

_She wants her two years back._

_She has nightmares that wake her in a sweat each night. She dreams of Bahak, she dreams about Kenson and a countdown she can't turn away from. To calm her mind, she throws herself to the ground and works her body until all she can feel the burn of her muscles and the certainty that she is awake and alive. It is one morning, when Vega salutes her and she wipes sweat from her forehead and looks anywhere but at him, that she thinks it:_ indoctrination _._

_She is terrified._

No, _she tells herself._ No.

* * *

 

_Six months after Bahak, Earth begins to burn. She is more horrified than she ever imagined she could be. Guilt weighs her down. Guilt propels her forward. She feels less a soldier and more a contradiction. She feels failure._

_She doesn't stop. James fights her on it, and she understands, but he doesn't until she's proven her strength and all but knocked some sense into him. (She knows their later sparring session means a great deal to him because of this. It makes her sick, almost.) Mars is a necessary diversion, and she is afraid as they approach that the Normandy will be sucked into a Reaper's blast and that will be the end, once and for all._

_Leaving Earth had felt impossible. Hoisting Kaidan onto her shoulders, wondering in circular thoughts whether he would live or die, was even more impossible. But she did. She kept moving._

_Guilt became regret._

_Regret became anger._

_Anger became pain._

_She wants desperately to find a free moment to bury her head in her hands and pull her hair until she can't think anymore. She wants a free moment to clean her armour, her rifle. She wants--_

_“We have a friend on Palaven,” Liara tells James, but she looks sideways at Jane._

_Inside, she is screaming. Inside, Jane is remembering blue blood spreading over the dingy floor of that Omega apartment, the roar of the gunship, the gurgling as he struggled to breathe--_

_"Let's go," is all she says, and they leap from the shuttle._

_Help, she begs of the sky._ Help us.

_The view of Palaven should have been beautiful. It is only a distraction, and she manages her focus._

I love you _, she thinks when he appears like a gift from a ravaged galaxy._

_Pain mingles with gratitude, and she believes this is what will carry her through the war._

* * *

 

Shepard is content to pass another evening listening to the sounds of her friends' laughter. Below, she hears the end of Kaidan telling an enthusiastic joke. He sounds excited, a little silly, and she strains to try and catch his words and frowns when she can't quite. Liara bursts into a trill of fresh laughter that Kaidan joins.

She leans against the railing and looks over the empty living area below. It looks tidier than she expects and she tilts her head and the colours in the apartment shift.

She catches herself, straightening so quickly she is dizzy. She shakes her head, frowns down at her hands.

"Hey. You're missing the party."

Shepard lifts her head in time to greet the end of Garrus's words with a grin. At the back of her mind, she wonders when he got up here. The question fades away when he comes to stand next to her. Laughter rings out below again and some tension loosens in her shoulders.

The party, she thinks.

"I'm catching some of it," she replies. He leans against the rail, facing her. She makes a gesture that attempts to encompass the whole of the apartment and the noise below. "Do you think this is what it will be like? After the war. Noise and people, coming and going and we never get a moment's peace?" She pauses. He waits. "Or do you think we'll all head our separate directions and that'll be that? Our lives carry on and everything that's happened will be a memory that we all try to forget."

"That's not going to happen.”

She looks at him. He shrugs, and gestures at the apartment laid out in front of them. She can’t help but look.

“Maybe there’ll be a lot more of this,” he says.

( _Noise and people and love and laughter_.)

She shakes her head, clearing her thoughts. She frowns. “Maybe,” she says, and it feels lofty, like it isn’t quite her thought anymore or this isn’t quite her voice anymore.

“Shepard,” Garrus says. A pause, and he corrects himself: “Jane.”

Shepard shoves her hands into her pockets to hide the way her fingers have begun to tremble. Her cheeks twitch and she gives up smiling.

“What?” he asks. “What is it?”

“Did you mean it? What you said?” She makes a vague, frustrated gesture with her hands that makes him tilt her head. She grunts, and turns away, slamming her hands on the rail. She imagines the vibrations running up her arms, the muted pain in her hands ( _her hands, her hands, the first thing that she noticed, the first sensations she was missing--)_ but she knows none of it is there. None of it is real.

( _we just have to beat the reapers first_ )

She can’t quite get the words from wherever they are hiding.

Shepard shakes her head again. Her hair dances around her head and she lets it hang, loose and messy.

_Of course I did,_ she imagines him saying except he doesn’t.

She looks at him.

He shrugs again.

“Look. Jane. Sweetheart.” He pauses, and shrugs again.

Shepard laughs, and when she releases the rail there is a burning in her palms that she hasn’t felt since her first death. She turns to face him, her smile returns, and he holds up a hand and the whole world grinds to a stop.

Her smile falls away.

“You know,” he says.

She blinks, and he sighs. She raises a hand just as he reaches for her, and he holds it carefully in both of his.

“Jane,” he says again. “You _know_.”

“Oh.” She pulls her hand away. This time, she shrugs. She shoves her hands back in her pockets, clears her throat, and turns away. “I’ll go see how they’re doing downstairs.”

“Shepard,” he says to her back. “You know and you’re hiding.”

The cheer in his voice is mismatched with the exhaustion underlying his words—exhaustion, Shepard knows, that belongs to her. She doesn’t turn away. One foot in front of the other, she doesn’t stop.

“This isn’t a sanctuary, Shepard.”

She freezes mid-stride, and hunches in on herself. In one blink, she is covering her ears with her hands. In another blink, she has turned back to face him. In another blink, she keeps walking and she joins the laughter downstairs and the party carries on.

She freezes.

“This is a punishment. You _know_.”

Slowly, she turns and looks at him but he is blurry and she can’t quite make him out. She opens her mouth, closes it.

“Give our future a shot.”

The chill spreads over her skin like fire. She knows.

* * *

 

_It all feels like too much. She wonders if this is her breaking point, if this is the thing she can’t come back from. The sheer absurdity of staring herself in the face and_ of having her fucking ship stolen _._

_“Are you kidding me?” she mutters as her clone goddamn announces herself. “Are you_ kidding _me?” she repeats as they break into a firefight on the_ Normandy _’s shuttle bay and hasn’t she already lost one ship?_

_“What good are you to anyone!” her clone roars, and Wrex scoffs nearby and says some unpleasant things that makes Jane feel the most motivated she has in weeks. “I can win this war! I can fight this war better than you ever will!”_

_Maybe, Jane thinks. Maybe._

_She slams a fresh heat sink into her pistol. She is so angry she thinks she will fade away, melt into the_ Normandy _and stop thinking and feeling._

_“What’s your plan, really? Throw yourself at the Reapers until you break apart? Until you’re just shrapnel?”_

_Jane is ready to destroy this version of herself. Lay waste to her fantasies and her constructed body. Then there’s a moment, where they’re both hanging loose out of the bay and Jane can feel nothing but irritation and a numbness in her legs she can’t quite explain._

_“What makes you so damn special? Why you and not me?”_

_She almost lets go._ I don’t know, _she almost says._

_And she wants to save her clone, wants to save herself if she’s being honest._

_“And then?” her clone taunts._

_“And then you live!” Jane insists._

_“For what?” her clone spits, and Jane’s stomach drops as she falls away._

* * *

 

She felt the wires fall away. She felt it all. She wished she hadn’t.

She thought: is this it? Is this all there is?

_Yes_ , something screamed inside her. _Fight for it_.

The pain was everything.

* * *

 

Shepard takes one step at a time. She counts her breaths: one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four—

As she passes the kitchen, the laughter grows louder and louder. The door slides open in the moment before she reaches it and she doesn’t hesitate. She thinks she knows what is waiting beyond the hall, but the moment she crosses the threshold the chill bursts over her skin again and she is suffocating.

Alchera spreads before her, and the _Normandy SR-1_ ’s bones rise up out of the snow.

Behind her is nothing.


	9. PITY

“…Pity, that what was my merit should be my Misfortune.”

-Samuel Richardson,  _Pamela_

 

Days went by.

John hadn’t spoken to Sanders or Fushikawa, let alone Howard, in four days. He hadn’t thought of them in three. He spent his time at Shepard’s side, listening to her breathe. Someone had thought to close her eyes when they brought her to the battered hospital, and someone else had been thoughtful enough to tuck her away in the least damaged room on the hospital’s first floor.

They began by bandaging the sores on her arms. Sometimes, John heard crackling and he thought it was coming from beneath the bandages, beneath the blankets. There was the spot on her face, and no matter how many hours past where he simply stared at the doctor’s work, all he could see was the gaping black that had been there when he had pulled the wiring free from her.

Something wasn’t right. He understood little of the muttered medical jargon that the ragged team assigned to Shepard bounced back and forth amongst themselves. Sometimes, they cast wide-eyed looks in her direction that sparked a protective fire in John’s chest. Sometimes, the same looks made him want to bolt from the room.

He didn’t know how long it had been since he had spoken to his mother.

More concerning even than Shepard’s apparent coma or her frightening brain activity or the wheezing breaths she took every fifteen seconds was the news that was brought to John every seven hours like clockwork.

Johnson was an attractive man, with dark hair curled tight to his scalp and dark eyes that narrowed in disappointment when he came into the room and saw only John was awake and looking back at him. John had no doubt that his reports were for Shepard, more than for him. He hoped she could hear.

Seven hours: “The fleet’s waking up. We’ll be fully operational in a day, the Admiral thinks. No sign of the Council yet.” A pause. “Reports of more screaming from the Keepers.”

“Shit,” John said. Johnson left.

Fourteen hours: “Geth and Salarian teams have begun work deconstructing a Reaper. So far, nothing to report beyond what is expected.” A pause, and John wondered  _what is to be expected._  “No discussion on the crucible.”

“Alright,” John said. Johnson left.

Twenty-one hours: “Restoring power to much of the city. Consolidation of leadership efforts from around the globe.” A pause. “People are wondering where Shepard is.”

Twenty-eight hours: “An Asari-led pseudo-council is being made up of leading military officials—“

Thirty-five hours: “Reaper dismantling continues. And the screaming—“

Forty-two hours: “Still no sign of the council. There are building concerns—“

Forty-nine hours: “It’s been agreed that the first topic of discussion for the…council…is the repair of the Sol relay. Our system can’t support—“

Fifty-seven hours: “The Admiral is concerned, ma’am. We need you.”

John could only watch Johnson. He wanted to ask him if he had known her, had known her beyond the symbol she had become. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He looked away before Johnson began to leave. He wasn’t ready to see his retreating back again.

So, four days past.

Hour ninety-eight, John was beginning to feel his own exhaustion. Stims were beginning to sound not only tempting but reasonable.

Johnson entered the room unannounced, as always, and stood all but backed against the crooked closed door. This was the point where he typically launched into his report, and even though he always looked at John the words were always meant for the woman behind him. John sagged in his chair, trusting that Johnson wasn’t here to kill Shepard in her sleep. He thought he might even be able to put his head back for five minutes until Johnson left, no doubt waking him abruptly with a slamming door or disapproving scoff.

“Sawyer,” Johnson said, and John stared.

“Uh,” he said, all eloquence and grace. He tried to straighten in his seat and almost fell out, his face flushing.

Johnson was suitably unimpressed, looking him over once, wondering, no doubt, what qualified this stumbling marine to protect the all-important Commander Shepard. Looking up at his scowling face, John wanted to scream that he had done things, he had earned his rank, he had even earned this spot by Shepard’s side as far as he was concerned—and was he not, after all, also a Shepard? He said nothing, and the two men stared at each other for a silence that stretched, and stretched, and stretched.

“Yeah?” John finally said.

“There’s talk, because resources are—“ Johnson dropped off, and he raised a hand in a waving gesture that John had never seen him make before. Like there was a stink in the room he wanted to shoo away. Perhaps there was, and John was just used to it.

In the corner of his eye, John saw Shepard’s covered legs. He heard her wheezing breaths.

Johnson continued.

“You know what I’m saying. In any case, keeping a room for Commander Shepard, keeping her—“

Johnson grimaced.

“Fed?” John supplied helpfully, tone dry.

“I suppose so.”

“People are complaining.”

Johnson paused for one of Shepard’s shaky breaths and then nodded. “She is only one soldier, after all.”

They stared at each other.

“Alright,” John said. “Thank you for the heads up.”

Johnson reached behind him for the door handle, and his eyes shifted back to Shepard’s prone form on the bed. “Keep an eye on her,” he said, and before John could scoff or mutter something along the lines of  _duh_ , Johnson had slipped through the door.

It clicked shut and John wasn’t even sure he had blinked.

He leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his face in his hands. He blew out a long, painful breath.

Behind him, machines beeped to remind him that Shepard was alive. As if he could miss the breathing. He resolved to get the doctors to explain what all of this was for, what everything was supposed to do, when they came by next. During their next scheduled visit, however, Admiral David Anderson came instead.

John leapt to his feet so quickly his chair toppled back. A familiar medic peered around the admiral’s back before Anderson shut the door with a click.

John, belatedly, saluted.

“Sir,” he managed out. “Admiral.”

“Lieutenant-Commander.” Anderson strode across the room, John watching, and came to stand at the end of Shepard’s bed.

Something twitched over his face and John looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. Shepard and Anderson’s friendship was a famous one, wasn’t it? It was them at the end of the galaxy, of the world, facing whatever it was. It was Anderson left behind when Shepard stumbled into that beam and Anderson who set about rebuilding what they could on Earth before anyone—before John—had even found Shepard.

He was the  _Normandy SR-1_ ’s original captain.

John couldn’t help it: he stared.

“Have they talked to you yet?” Anderson nodded towards the door, finally looking away from Shepard. “The medics.”

She wheezed out a breath.

“They don’t, sir,” John said. “Talk to me, that is. They stare, sir.”

“They don’t, sir,” John said.

Anderson’s mouth twitched.

“I’m sure,” he said.  He crossed his arms. He was watching John, resolute, and John wondered if he was avoiding looking at her. “They say the damage is extensive.”

John blinked. “To her…body, you mean.”

“Yes. They think the shock of pulling her free might have been too much.”

He said it flatly. Slowly. Like it was the image of David Anderson that John carried about in his head speaking, rather than the man himself.

 _What was she like_ , he wanted to ask and his heart hammered in his chest.

“To her brain, you mean.”

“To her mind.”

“They want to—what, they want to let her go?”

“I don’t know, Sawyer. The suggestion is the Commander has done enough.”

A chill spread over his skin. “Sir… you mean that we’re keeping her here. Keeping her alive. Because she might never wake up on her own.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

John’s head jerked. He studied the admiral, disbelieving. “Do you think they’re right, sir?”

Anderson’s expression didn’t shift. “I think you should stay here, Sawyer, and not take your eyes off of her.”

 _What_ , John thought. His stomach dropped.

He was suddenly afraid, and there were no more questions he could ask.

* * *

 

She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting in the cold, hugging her knees to her chest in a desperate effort to hold onto whatever body heat she still has. Shepard tucks her chin between her knees. She stares out at the  _Normandy_  and she tries to remember what it felt like, wandering through the Citadel with Ash and Kaidan on either side and that admittedly temporary sensation of safety wafting about them. All she can remember, however, is what it felt like to suffocate. What it was to stare at the wreckage of the  _Normandy_  and hope—pray, even—that she had done enough to save enough of her crew.

She swears into the cold. The words fog.

“Shepard,” the Catalyst says to her left and she scoffs.

“How long have you been there?” Shepard snaps. She doesn’t unfold from where she sits.

A blink, and her battered helmet appears in front of her. Another blink, and it’s away, returned to its place on her desk aboard the  _Normandy_ — _is that now is that then_.

She shoves her chin harder into one of her knees. She grimaces.

“You still have choices to make.”

She doesn’t look at it. She knows it is changed.

She doesn’t want to see what it is now. She doesn’t want to see what she must have looked like, battered and sucked inside her armour and dead.

“Shepard.”

“Shut up.”

“Shepard.”

“ _Shut up_.”

“You still have choices. Make good ones.”

Rage burns through her and Shepard leaps to her feet. She has her fists raised when she pivots to face the Catalyst’s ghost, but comes face to face with a waiting door.

Shepard stares at it. Her heart pounds in her chest. Behind her, Alchera stretches.

She returns to the apartment, shaken. Her heart rat-a-tats in her chest and she thinks it will never stop.

But it is easy to forget, and her lips begin to smile in moments.


	10. CROWN

“Before I begin my attack, I must first become acquainted with her and her whole mental state.”

Soren Kierkegaard, “The Seducer’s Diary”

 

“This—to Bates—was the greatest terror of war: what you didn’t know of the men who told you what to do—where to go and when. What if they were mad—or stupid? What if their fear was greater than yours? Or what if they were brave and crazy—wanting and demanding bravery from you?”

Timothy Findley, _The Wars_

 

The unspoken assumption was this: Shepard was the only one who could explain what happened, and whether the war was really over. The result was a steady stream of people, in and out of Shepard’s room: turians and krogan that never introduced themselves to John, her silent protector, as they bent to step into the room; human who gazed at her with a mixture of horror and curiosity; a handful of salarians and asari, who each thought they had the key to waking her up.

John wanted to scream at all of them. How could they treat her like something to be poked and prodded? Was she not a hero? Had she not saved them all? _Was she not his sister?_

Nothing was certain, except that John desperately wanted her to wake the hell up and explain what had happened up there.

The Keepers kept screaming. Once, late in the night, John had snapped at Johnson for repeating this news to Shepard over and over (“do you think she really wants to hear this shit?”). Johnson had only grown louder, speaking over John’s voice.

John had let him.

Beyond the walls of the hospital, a turian-human team was beginning the work of dismantling a Reaper on the surface. John thought it was close. He thought he could hear the whine of the limbs coming apart during the brief moments he let himself doze.

Once, he dreamt that he was there, clambering along one of the creature’s legs. It roared, but nothing came to life beneath him.

The Citadel’s VI’s voice sounded around him as he climbed, as he breathed wheezy, creaking breaths like Shepard’s.

“ _A myth common to several cultures in the galaxy, Reapers were once imagined as space monsters that consumed entire stars_.”

It sounded almost cheerful.

“ _Although accurate information about the Reapers remains scarce, the galaxy now knows that the Reapers are not a myth—they are a real and devastating threat._ ”

“She sounds almost cheerful,” Fushikawa said from above him, sitting cross legged and cross on the Reaper’s leg. Beyond her, Sanders laughed.

“ _They are going to fall_ ,” the VI warned him.

“No!” John cried in the dream, and he fell.

He jerked awake and had spent the next several hours staring resolutely at the closed door, counting Shepard’s breaths.

John barely slept in the days that followed. The solar system seemed too small.

The room seemed too big.

* * *

 

“Humanity is resilient,” John told her, early one morning with sleep dragging at his eyes. “And you’re the very best of humanity. So what do you say, huh? You want to wake up and explain what the fuck happened?” He paused. “What the fuck is happening?”

Shepard didn’t answer.

John sighed and turned his back to her again, watching the door.

“I’m nervous,” he said out loud, and was immediately ashamed.

“They’re taking apart more Reapers now,” John told her, in the middle of the night. He received only steady beeping and creaky breathing as a reply, but carried on. “Doesn’t that creep you out? Aren’t Reapers made of harvested species?”

He shivered. He crossed his arms. He leaned on the back legs of his chair until vertigo swirled in his belly.

He dropped down, his feet flat to the ground. Hunched, John watched the door.

“I survived,” John said. “If I can survive—You ever face a thresher maw, Shepard?”

He choked, he gagged.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

* * *

 

“You’re not looking so hot,” he observed to Johnson, dry and exhausted.

Johnson sighed. His stiff body sagged.

“Something’s not right,” he said, and that was the entirety of his report. Not that John pressed.

* * *

 

He had taken to resting his arm on her bed, just near enough to her that he imagined he could feel her body heat like a reminder that she was alive and present and he wasn’t just hallucinating her breaths.

“I’m your brother,” he told her softly, and rested his head on the edge of her bed.

It lasted a fearful moment before he straightened, and returned to watching the door.

One hour until Johnson’s next report.

He couldn’t shake the fearful pain in the pit of his stomach. He wouldn’t sleep. He was having fierce flashbacks of the moments before everything went to shit at Akuze and he was sure that _that_ was the first time he had said that name in years.

He only blinked because he had to.

“I had regrets,” he told her, and forgot context. “I had things I wish I had said. I’ve wished a few times that I had died there. I’ve wished a few times that I was rotting thresher maw shit somewhere.”

He pressed his lips into a thin, dry line.

He rested his forehead in one palm. He felt hot. He was afraid.

 _Of what,_ he wondered.

The hour slipped away and there was no sign of Johnson. John’s comm fizzled and cracked until he slipped it out of his ear, until he dropped his omni-tool to the ground.

He spat out everything he could to her, hoped some part of it would inch into the crevices of her battered mind. _Wake up, Shepard, damn you_.

He held his pistol between his legs and he waited.

And everything went to shit.

* * *

 

“Shepard?” Ashley asks.

Shepard’s disorientation doesn’t last long.

Of course she’s here, sitting on the couch.

She slings an arm over the back and turns just enough to face Ashley.

“What happened up there?” Ashley asks, and points at the ceiling with a crooked smile on her lips.

“Up there?” Shepard echoes.

“When you fired the Crucible.”

Shepard closes her mouth. Her arm slips down the side of the couch and she squeezes her hands into fists. “Don’t, Ash,” she warns, soft and painful. The world wavers around her. “You shouldn’t know about that.”

Sadly, Ashley says: “I shouldn’t be here, at all. What are you afraid of?”

Shepard opens her mouth, and the world goes black.

“You already made your decisions, Shepard,” Ashley tells her from far away. “You can’t come back from them.”

* * *

 

_“Wake up.”_

_“What?”_

_Jane is on her knees. Everything hurts. Tears burn at the edges of her eyes and she slaps them away. She lifts her head, and she half-expects to see Anderson’s battered body next to her._

_But she is alone._

_“Where am I?”_

_And the Catalyst stands before her, glowing and taunting. She chokes on her grief._

_“—just as we left your people alive the last time we were here.”_

_Solution, Jane thinks. She doesn’t know how she is standing._

_“This isn’t a solution,” she whispers._

_“The fact that you are standing here, the first organic ever, proves that there is hope,” the Catalyst promises._

_She crumples, and stares out at the stars above them._

_“Releasing the energy of the Crucible will end the cycle.”_

_She releases a long breath and she drags her aching limbs forwards._

_“This is a decision that cannot be unmade,”_ _Avina’s calm voice warns her._

_“I know,” Jane gasps as she is dragged against the console. “I know.”_

_The cables grip her tight. She can’t breathe._

_She raises her pistol and fires._

* * *

 

“Lieutenant-Commander Sawyer.”

The doctor was smiling.

John didn’t know his name.

He was young. Had a huge scar running down the left side of his head, straight through his hair so you’d almost think it was deliberate. The truth was that he had encountered a banshee, and that encounter had gone better than most encounters with a banshee did.

John didn’t know his name.

“Yeah?” he replied. He straightened in his chair.

Shepard wheezed a long breath behind him. John’s hands twitched around his pistol.

The doctor was smiling.

“We’ve come to a decision.”

His eyes shifted to Shepard. John stood.

“Yeah?” John repeated.

The medic looked at him again. “Yes. You have to understand, Lieutenant-Commander, everything will be right again once the Commander is gone.” The medic paused. John’s heart hammered in his chest. “She is the anomaly.”

“Sure she is,” John drawled, and he raised his pistol. “Time to leave the room son. I’m going to get the Alliance here.”

The medic shook his head. “We are the Alliance,” he sighed.

 _Shit_ , John thought.

The medic’s omni-tool flared and John fired. They both dropped, John screaming, the bolt sucking against his neck and setting all his nerves aflame. Horror and shame intermingled as he writhed against the ground, drool collecting at the edges of his mouth and the back of his throat as he cried out. The back of his head banged against the ground, sending fresh waves of white confusion over his eyes.

“ _Not yet_!” someone called from the hall, but he couldn’t see he couldn’t catch it he couldn’t—

“We still need her,” someone hissed from far away, and John blacked out.

* * *

 

_Reaper ‘indoctrination’ is an insidious means of corrupting organic minds, ‘reprogramming’ the brain through physical and psychological conditioning using electromagnetic fields, infrasonic and ultrasonic noise, and other subliminal methods. The Reaper’s resulting control over the limbic system leaves the victim highly susceptible to its suggestions._

_Organics undergoing indoctrination may complain of headaches and buzzing or ringing in their ears. As time passes, they have feelings of ‘being watched’ and hallucinations of ‘ghostly’ presences. Ultimately, the Reaper gains the ability to use the victim’s body to amplify is signals, manifesting as ‘alien’ voices in the mind._

_Indoctrination can create perfect deep cover agents. A Reaper’s ‘suggestions’ can manipulate victims into betraying friends, trusting enemies, or viewing the Reaper itself with superstitious awe. Should a Reaper subvert a well-placed political or military leader, the resulting chaos can bring down nations._

_Long-term physical effects of the manipulation are unsustainable. Higher mental functioning decays, ultimately leaving the victim a gibbering animal. Rapid indoctrination is possible, but causes this decay in days or weeks. Slow, patient indoctrinations allows the thrall to last for months or years._


	11. SOLITUDE

“You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

D.H. Lawrence, _Women in Love_

 

When she opens her eyes, she knows that there is a wall between what she is and what she feels. She stares at the ceiling above the bed, a ceiling that has prompted a hundred considerations of what her mentor saw in this apartment and where she could take her own life—in any case, she stares at the ceiling above the bed and blinks twice, searching within her emotional core for some evidence that she is truly present.

When she sits up, Shepard notices that everything looks sharper than usual. She tilts her head. She rubs a hand across the bed sheets.

She is alone and the apartment is quiet.

The emptiness doesn’t touch her, but neither does her fear.

She stands. She paces back and forth to make sure her legs still work. Then, Shepard stretches and waits for the familiar popping of her shoulders. Nothing.

She goes downstairs.

“Hello,” Avina greets from the couch. She is glowing, her voice has a strange, calm, echoing quality to it that feels far too familiar to Shepard. Avina crosses her legs and pats the spot next to her.

“Hello,” Shepard greets, reluctantly. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth. She shakes her head, trying to shake the foggy cobwebs loose.

Avina raises a dismissing hand. “Oh, don’t worry. It’ll pass when we’re done. If you want it to, of course.”

Shepard has no reply. She sits.

Avina turns her false smile towards her, casting her purple light over the furniture.

“So,” Avina says. “To start, let me apologize for this interruption. I know you’ve just returned and I’m sure it’s pleasant, to be among your friends.”

“My friends,” Shepard echoes. Some version of her throws her head back and laughs. She, here and now and blinking slowly, does not. “I’m sure it is,” she says instead.

Avina laughs, a light tinkly sound something like bells.

“Shepard, I’m very sorry for this, but it is time for you to face the consequences of your decision.” Avina rests a hand on her knee. Shepard stares down at it. “Jane, darling.”

“What?”

Another laugh. Avina pulls her hand away. Shepard has a glimpse of a thought of a memory of—EDI. Something clenches inside her and she wants to look away. She is unable to.

“Don’t worry,” Avina says. “It won’t be the terrible thing you imagine.”

“It can’t get much more terrible than I imagine.”

“I’m sure, but here it is, another choice for you, Commander.”

“Another one.”

“Another one.” Avina shifts in her seat. She lets out a long sigh, and then turns her stiff smile on Shepard again. “Do you want to stay in this fantasy, Shepard? Or will you allow yourself peace?”

Shepard blinks.

“Let me go, and I’ll decide.”

Avina shakes her head, slowly. “It’s easier this way. If you’re empty.”

“That’s not what I am.”

“It’s what you are right now.”

They look at each other. Shepard looks away first, tapping a finger against her thigh in a steady rhythm. The apartment is so quiet.

She makes a choice, but when she looks back Avina has been replaced by the glimmering image of the Catalyst.

The terror envelops her, freezes her. The rush of her soul returning to her body is painful, tearing through her nerves and firing all along the edges of her brain. She feels like she is caving in on herself, but she can’t move. She doesn’t move. She just stares at the Catalyst, her mouth gaping and her muscles quivering.

“This is a reset,” the Catalyst tells her in its child’s voice. “Try again, Shepard.”

* * *

 

_“Here’s the situation, Jane: I can’t save you. Damn me, but I wish I could. I wish I could wake you up and push you to your feet and hold you upright so everyone could see your fire. For you, for the galaxy and everything we’re going to have to do from here on—and yeah it’s a goddamn we, Commander—but also for me. I want to wake you up for me because here’s the deal: I know you like the rest of the galaxy knows you but I want to know you like we should have known each other. And I want those to match. So—so fucking fight it, Jane, whatever you’re fighting. Fight to come back and pick up where you left off and tell us all what the fuck happened up there and let us know that this is over. Maybe by the time you do that us will include all the people you want it to but even if it doesn’t—even if it’s a century or never before anyone finds Normandy and your crew again—just come back, Jane. Just—wake up, Shepard.”_

* * *

 

“Jane.”

She opens her eyes, and smiles up at Garrus. He squeezes her shoulder and they sit up together.

“Thanks,” Shepard says, and rubs at her temples. She yawns and her jaw cracks. She stretches and her back pops.

“A nightmare?” Garrus asks.

“Yeah,” she admits. She rubs the back of her neck and stands. “It’s…” She shrugs.

“What?”

She looks at him then, and the ground is unsteady beneath her. She opens her mouth. She closes it. She comes around the edges of the bed and knocks her knees against it, reaching out to touch him. Her hand doesn’t quite make it all the way, and she freezes.

“What?” he says again.

“Even if it’s a century or never,” she mutters.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and then where grief should live comes rage.

She drops her hand to her side.

“Shepard,” Garrus says and he stands.

She has already turned away, making her way across the bedroom. She slides open the closet door so hard it slams into the opposite wall, making the whole of the dream quiver around them.

“Jane!”

“No,” she says. “ _No_.”

Avina sighs from where Garrus had been standing and the rage burns hotter and higher within Shepard.

“We weren’t careful enough with you,” Avina says.

As she lifts her heavy pistol from its place beneath her armour, Shepard turns to face her. “No, you fucking weren’t.” She raises the pistol to her temple and fires.

Jane Shepard drops, and Avina comes to stand over her.


	12. KNOWLEDGE

 

“Was it cruel? Of course it was. Not to let him hear her voice. Nothing was left of him, you know. Nothing but nerves and pain and his mind. No voice—no flesh. Nothing. Just his _self_.”

Timothy Findley, _The Wars_

 

John wasn’t alone as he was filed into a chilled basement. He was groggy, barely awake, and extremely disorientated. His neck burned and every muscle ached. He wasn’t sure he could form a word.

“Sawyer!”

He shifted his head enough to see the makeshift cells he was guided passed, and Anderson’s wide eyes staring straight at him.

“I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but what came out was garbled, more moaning than actual speech.

“Sawyer! Where is Shepard! Where is—“

John blacked out again as he was dropped to the ground, his cheek sliding against the floor and pain shooting through every part of him.

* * *

 

What does it mean, that the _Normandy_ is missing?

* * *

 

“I don’t know how to play at being indoctrinated,” Sanders growled, sounding angrier than Helena had ever heard him before. The man was almost ten years her senior, with a desperate desire of a horde of offspring and a love of romance vids. It was almost refreshing to hear him like this, angry and frustrated and yeah, just a bit afraid.

Helena was feeling all those things as well.

“Just look dreamy,” she muttered, straightening her breastplate. She grunted, pulling her helmet over her head. “Wobble a bit.”

“You ever see a husk wobble?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a goddamn husk, Helena.”

They watched each other for a moment, and then Sanders sighed and his shoulders dropped. He rolled his shoulders, pulling the stolen khaki jacket tighter over his broad chest. Helena rolled her eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“What’s-her-face said John’s comm was disabled.”

“We, as a team, really need to work on learning people’s names.”

“ _Focus_. My point is that we have no way of contacting him—“

“Not news to me.”

“— _so_ we should just get to wherever the fuck they’re keeping Shepard.”

“Assuming,” Sanders said, so low that Helena whipped around to study the grim expression on his face. “That Shepard’s still alive.”

Helena considered this, and then shook her head. “She is. We’d know it if she wasn’t. They’d display bits of her or something and leave offerings to her ghost.”

Sanders turned a bit green, and Helena thought she had been successful.

With Helena’s face covered and Sanders hunched in his stolen disguise, they entered the hospital. Or what was left of it. Helena could imagine swarms of people coming in and out, talking quietly and bending heads wringing hands, but she couldn’t see passed the scorch marks and crumbled concrete around it. _Vancouver_ , she thought again and a cramp tore through her upper body, bringing with it nausea and pure pain. Alongside all this, there was the stench. It wasn’t quite like something burning, but it gripped the crevices of Helena’s brain, creeping into her dreams when she slept, and itching her nostrils as she walked. It was everywhere in London. She was afraid to talk about it, now, afraid that admitting it would mean it was either real or she was losing her mind.

The post-war Sol system was all silence and twitches.

“Walk with confidence,” she said to Sanders, and rolled her shoulders. The look he shot her told her he knew that the reminder was more for her than him.

And confidence seemed to work. There were no salutes from the indoctrinated—and what else could they be? Traitors? She couldn’t think of it—and Sanders and Helena made their way all but uninterrupted. Anyone who cast them a second look Helena ignored with _intention_ and _confidence_. They carried on. Sanders kept his head low, following at her heels. He checked the layout of the building on his omni-tool regularly, catching Helena’s elbow with a gentle tug every now and then to send her in the right direction.

  
The hallway, when they reached it, was empty.

More silence. Helena twitched. A chill went along her arms. She patted her rifle, feeling absurdly needy.

“Would they leave her alone?” Sanders muttered. His voice came from just above her head, and Helena gritted her teeth. It was an annoying, sometimes endearing habit both Sanders and Sawyer had: peeking over her like she was a fence or an angry barricade. Familiar. Familial.

Helena swallowed. “I don’t know.”

They glanced at each other, shrugged, and carried on.

 

Many of the doors were open as they passed them, the rooms beyond looking disheveled and empty or as though being used as clumsy storage spaces. They did a rushed sweep of the hall and met, tense, at one closed door.

“Think we’ll find her in pieces?” Helena muttered.

“Helena,” Sanders warned, and raised his omni-tool to the door. A buzz, a hum, and a flash of the door before the pneumatic hinges hissed apart. She was stepping through before the doors had slid all the way open.

Helena’s heart expanded, filling her chest and pressing against her stomach, her intestines. She could feel it, pounding and sucking in and wheezing out her blood. She thought she might pass out, frozen just over the threshold.

Sander set a heavy hand on her shoulder.

She jerked away from him.

“Fushikawa,” Sanders hissed.

They looked together.

Coming down the hall was a sweating doctor, their eyes bulging out of their sockets and curly hair spread like a crooked halo. Their clothes were pristine, hugging their body and glaring white even in the hospital. They wobbled.

“You!” they called. “What are you doing?”

There was a throbbing by Helenea’s shoulder, still pointed towards the open doorway. She hadn’t even had to get a good look to know they were in the right place (the wrong place).

Sanders cleared his throat.

“I’m escorting this technician,” Helena blurted out. She jerked a thumb at Sanders, and then reached her other hand around her back, ready to snatch her assault rifle from its place.

“What?” The doctor blinked. Scowled. “You can’t go in there.”

Helena’s left eye twitched.

“Sure I can,” she replied flatly.

She heard Sanders sigh.

“Do you know how dangerous that is?” The  doctor gestured wildly at them. “You’re hardly _dressed_ to be near her. Lack of preparedness will destroy you. You don’t know what being around her will do.”

Helena’s right eye twitched.

“Sure I do.”

“Helena—“

The doctor’s boots were loud against the floor. They opened their mouth to continue, and Helena’s mouth collided with their face with the most satisfying of crunches.

The doctor dropped.

Helena looked up at Sanders.

He shook his head.

They entered the room together without another glance at the sprawled figure, and the door slid shut behind them.

Above them, Helena knew, the multispecies fleets were on the brink of an explosive _disagreement_. In a moment of self-doubt, she wondered if there was an idiot up there waiting to do the space battle equivalent of a punch to the face. Regret didn’t last long, but it made her hands shake.

She pulled her helmet from her head and ran a hand over her short hair, feeling the softness of it.

“Well,” Sanders muttered. “What do you want me to say, Helena?”

“You’re not my dad,” Helena replied. She inhaled. Softly: “At least the smell is gone.”

“Maybe,” Sanders agreed, just as softly. He strode to the side of the bed, looking down.

There was no doubt about it: this was Commander Shepard, legendary hero and the first human Spectre.

A very important woman.

Helena wanted to roll her eyes. She moved close to Sanders’s side, her cheek almost pressed to this arm, and peered down at Shepard. Was this the face she remembered? There was the shock of red hair, spread around her hair. Old scars lining her cheeks and neck, and there was no doubt fresh ones waiting to spider over the skin underneath the bandaging. A machine beeped the slow pace of Shepard’s heart.

It was a long time ago. It felt like a long time ago.

“Do you think John has always kept his hair short so no-one would recognize—well, that?” Sanders gestured at Shepard’s head, and then seemed to become self-conscious. He slowly withdrew his hand, tucking it in a fist at his side.

“Don’t know,” Helena replied. “I mean, his haircut probably has nothing to do with his long years of military service.”

They looked at each other, and their near-identical haircuts.

Sanders groaned. “It’s probably good we’re spending some time apart.”

Helena looked back down at Shepard and then immediately regretted it. She opted to look around the room instead: no windows, but overflowing shelves of medical supplies and enough spare blankets to hide Helena comfortably. Was Shepard cold frequently? Were they keeping her alive for something?

“Fuck,” Helena said. “I hate her. I actually hate her.”

She felt Sanders’s eyes on her but didn’t turn around. She waited for the admonishment.

Instead: “Helena, are you in love with John?”

She whipped around, a string of angry, offended insults on the tip of her tongue. She froze when she was the crooked, half-forced grin on Sanders’s face.

“Fuck you.”

He laughed, but it didn’t last. He looked at Shepard.

“It could have been us,” Sanders said, wistful. “Following a Shepard around the galaxy. Doing good, life-threatening work.” He stepped back from the bed and moved towards the shelves. He righted a toppled chair along the way.

Helena rolled her eyes. “Please.”

“You never know.”

“Don’t talk in absolutes.”

Sanders sighed. “If it’s not that you love our dear Sawyer, what do you dislike about Shepard?”

Helena had made her way back to Shepard’s bedside. It was hard to look away from the brightness of the Commander’s hair and Helena was reaching out to touch it before she realized what she was doing. “I hate her,” she corrected softly.

“Well then. Why do you hate her? She’s the ideal human, isn’t she? The ideal citizen of the galaxy. The ideal soldier.”

“Is she?” Helena bent, eyes tracing the contours of Shepard’s face: the sharp cut of her nose, her hollow cheeks, the hair of her eyebrows—where she almost expected to see Sawyer’s scar but they were uninterrupted.

“That’s what the vids tell us.”

“That’s what John tells us,” Helena said, and thought of her father. Her breath caught. Her jaw clenched.

“Helena?”

She took a deep breath, and she knew with all the surety she could that the smell was finally, finally gone.

“Wake up, you stupid bitch,” she muttered.

Shepard’s eyes snapped open, and Helena felt the hand at her throat before she had registered completely that she wasn’t hallucinating. She fought, her gloves hands slapping at her arm.

Shepard’s eyes were bright and wide and terrifyingly green. She inhaled a wheezing breath and Helena swore her heart stopped.

“Where the fuck is my ship?” Shepard gasped out.

* * *

 

Everything hurt.

But pain she could handle. Strangers she could handle. A confusing situation and a confusing surrounding made up of machinery that matched the ache in her bones so perfectly—she had wanted more than brutality, she had always wanted _life and that had meant a thousand different things over so many years_ —

But this—

(Fire and rebirth, she has done this before.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay i'm home with stable internet and a working keyboard again so i'll have the last chapters up asap.


	13. DOWN

“Robert didn’t know, sometimes, what to do with Harris’s sentences; where to fit them in his mind, or how to use them. He only knew they went somewhere inside him and they didn’t come back out." 

Timothy Findley, _The Wars_

 

Shepard was finally awake and through the pain and the agony and the confusion and the knowledge that something was not right (again, again, a-fucking-gain) she was immensely grateful for it.

“Commander—“

She glared at the lumbering man out of the corner of her eye. He was advancing slowly, his hands held out in a placating gesture. Her eyes flickered to his omni-tool, flashing on his arms.

She released the woman—girl—person and watched her stumble back, cursing and gasping out Shepard’s name.

“Give me your tool,” Shepard said, and her voice was so hoarse it barely carried across the room. She pulled herself forward, wires tugging at her skin. “Fucking damn—“ She tore herself free of the sensors and ignored the panicked beeping that ensued around them.

“What?” the man said.

Shepard resisted rolling her eyes. “ _Give me your tool_ ,” she repeated and finally slipped over the edge of the bed. “I need to—“ And then her trembling legs gave out from underneath her and Jane Shepard collapsed with a squawk, landing on her ass.

“Serves you fucking right!” the girl snapped.

Shepard ignored her.

“Your ship, right? You want to get in contact with your crew?” The man stepped closer and lowered himself, slowly, to the ground in front of Shepard. He was still holding out his hands in that placating, irritating gesture. Shepard wanted him to stop, but she wasn’t sure in the moment how to make him and opted to look away instead. She glared down at her trembling legs. “Who knows how long it’s been since you walked last,” the man said, thoughtfully. He cleared his throat.

“Commander… I’m Lieutenant Jason Sanders with the Alliance. This is Helena Fushikawa.”

Shepard blinked. She looked at Fushikawa, who was glaring at her.

“I’ll deal with that later,” she decided.

“Like hell you will,” Fushikawa grumbled, rubbing her throat.

“Look, the _Normandy_ ’s not in the system,” Lieutenant Sanders continued. “In fact… well, everything’s a bit of a mess right now, Commander, and we could really use your help.”

“This hospital is buzzing with indoctrinated ninnies,” Fushikawa added, only reluctantly helpful.

Shepard, bracing herself on the bed, got to her feet. “The Crucible didn’t work then.” She wasn’t entirely surprised, though so much of it had felt _so real_. She realzed, slowly, that there was work ahead of her in parsing out the bits of her ending that had been real, and had been a stepping stone to the very real now.

“Oh no, it worked,” Sanders carried on, startling Shepard. “Apparently it shot red light all over the place and incapacitated the Reaper forces They just dropped, or so we heard.”

Shepard looked from Sanders to Fushikawa and then back. “So you heard,” she echoed.

Sanders shrugged. He helped Fushikawa to her feet.

“We were on the lower decks of the _Rouen_.”

Shepard blinked. “I don’t know it.”

Fushikawa made such an exaggerated roll of her eyes, Shepard was surprised her eyes didn’t fall out of their sockets.

Jane looked between them again. “Alright,” she said slowly. She nodded in Fushikawa’s direction. “I’m sorry. About the, ah…” She made a gesture at her own throat.

Fushikawa glared. “If you weren’t so physically _fucked_ already I’d break your damn nose.”

Shepard’s mouth twitched in a smile.

“We’ll fill you in,” Sanders promised. “As much as we can. But we need to get you out of here.

Shepard nodded, and a moment of guilt wracked her stomach. She rubbed a hand over her bandaged midsection, and flinched, a memory of _violation_ —

She shook her head.

No. Not again.

“First,” she said in her croaky voice and gestured at her bare body. “I need some clothes.”

This time, Fushikawa smiled.

* * *

 

The hallway outside her room was empty, but there was a buzz of commotion around her that Shepard couldn’t quite figure out. She ignored a hushed conversation between Sanders and Fushikawa, paying only half-attention to the way Sanders pointed aggressively at the ground and Fushikawa flipped him off. Standing naked in the hall, with the hushed commotion of her new companions and the unsettling buzzing that she felt primarily against the back of her neck, Shepard tilted her head.

Ah, the light. There was a quality to it that she didn’t notice immediately, and took a moment for her to identify: it was real. She closed her eyes against a sudden onslaught of pain and disappointment, and there was a yearning in the pit of her stomach that she wanted to hold onto: a means of surviving all that she still had to do.

She turned back to Fushikawa and Sanders, who were staring at her. Feeling exposed and irritated, but tired more than any of these, she asked: “Where are we?”

Fushikawa blinked, but neither answered for a moment until Sanders seemed to take the responsibility on himself.

He opened his mouth, and Shepard shook her head. She turned her back to them and looked up at the ceiling, studying the stars and the flashing light of the ongoing battle overhead. “Nevermind,” she sighed, and tried to ignore the flickering light of the Catalyst at her elbow. She blinked, and looked back down at the hallway and saw nothing but it. “I know where we are.”

Shepard scrounged up a loose pair of pants and a jacket that chafed against her breasts from a nearby supply room. As she dressed, in a way that clumsy and argumentative but also endearing, Sanders and Fushikawa began the long work of ‘filling her in.’

She didn’t know what to be surprised at. She settled on nothing.

There was a smell to the clothing she couldn’t identify, something vaguely musty but also very similar to the smell of rations just after the vacuum seal was broken. She sniffed at the collar experimentally, studied by the increasingly anxious Sanders and the perpetually irritated Fushikawa.

“You get used to it,” Fushikawa muttered.

“I thought we’d agreed that it was gone,” Sanders cut in.

"Obviously it came back.”

Shepard considered them, blinking. She opened her mouth to ask, and then shook her head. “Let’s just go,” she said, and brokered no argument.

She took point automatically, or Fushikawa and Sanders fell into place automatically behind her. It was hard to tell. They came across a soldier barreling down the hallway towards them as they emerged, and Shepard took him down without restraint and hesitation.

Indoctrinated ninnies, she reminded herself, and studied the man’s pistol. Human, she observed.

She hooked a line of heat sinks along the inside of the jacket, barely feeling them as they brushed against the heavy bandaging along her ribs and stomach. What had happened to her, she wondered, though she feared her quiet knowledge of the answer.

Together, she and Sanders undid the soldier’s omni-tool from his arm and Shepard slid it over her own. There was an uncomfortable crackling and the sensation that this was not _hers_. She couldn’t shake it.

She wanted her own armour.

She wanted her own weapons.

She wanted to know where her ship was, where her crew was.

If it had all been a dream, a hallucination, what was happening now, what had happened to the mass relay? Where was the _Normandy_? What had happened to her, to Shepard? If there were no Reapers, why were there thralls?

“Try to keep them alive,” Shepard said instead of dissolving into a slew of worried questions. She adjusted the omni-tool as best she could. She could already hear, clearly now, the rumble of footsteps in the hall.

Someone knew something was wrong.

“You know nobody knows a cure for indoctrination except, you know, smearing brains on a wall,” Fushikawa countered.

Shepard shot her an unimpressed glare and they held the irritated gaze of the other for a moment, until Fushikawa broke with a click of her tongue and looked away.

“We don’t know that this is indoctrination,” Shepard finally said.

“What else could it be?” Sanders asked softly. His shields flickered to life around him, a comforting blue light that disappeared a moment later.

A moment Shepard took to steel herself. “We don’t know that is indoctrination,” she repeated, slowly.

They heard shouting n the hall, and the conversation died.

“After you, Commander,” Fushikawa drawled. Sanders shot her a glare that Shepard didn’t miss.

“Stay close,” Shepard replied. She wasn’t in the mood for games and this was hardly the place. She kicked a table from the side room they had ducked into, gerrymandering a weak cover that they immediately threw themselves behind.

A moment would be enough.

The hallway was narrow, the lighting poor, and she was inadequately armed—

“Hospitals,” Shepard sighed, and just the slip of the thought had a jolt of electricity shooting up her spine.

_“Shepard!”_

_Liara is already dashing down the opposite hall, her arm raised for a covering singularity. Shepard’s mouth breaks into a wide grin and she ignores the heaviness in her limbs, throwing herself after her with Garrus’s voice crackling in her comm—_

Sanders’s drone flew passed her ear.

She shook herself free.

There was a bang that shook the hall, and a handful of pained voices crying out.

“Let’s go!” Shepard gasped out, and they dashed down the hall, Shepard fighting through a wave of dizziness that made the hallway shift around her.

_No_ , she thought. _Not here_.

And for a moment, that was all it took.

“We need a comm link,” she said, peering around a corner.

“That’s been an issue,” said Sanders. “Let’s get out of here first, and the we can see if we can contact Hackett or Anderson.”

Fushikawa shook her head, and Shepard’s heart clenched.

“They got Anderson,” Fushikawa muttered and looked at her. “He was keeping an eye on you, but they nabbed him.”

“He’s alive,” Shepard said.

“We hope so.”

A warmth mingled with ice spread through Shepard’s gut. _Anderson_ , she thought and—ah, there it was.

Hope.

 

* * *

 

Huddled together amongst wreckage and what was left of London, Shepard fought herself to focus on opening a comm link with the stolen omni-tool. Fushikawa watched her and Sanders work with an expression Shepard could only describe as suspicious, but she was mercifully quiet. Or as quiet as Shepard supposed Fushikawa ever got.

“At least you’ve recruited the best of the best,” Sanders said in false cheer, and then cursed as the link failed again.

Shepard forced a smile. Fushikawa gagged.

Up above them, the dark blue of Earth’s sky seemed endless. She was unable to think on it. Not yet.

It was Hackett they finally reached, siphoned through a string of unimpressed and suspicious voices that only listened when they recognized who Shepard was. It was a slow realization that came with the increasing awareness of the ache in her limbs: yes, she was Commander Shepard; yes, she was going to help; _yes_ , she needed to speak to the Admiral—now.

Though all of that seemed impossible with her as she was now. What was Commander Shepard, really, without her ship and her crew and her team? All of those things that made her strong, made her able to fight.

Fighting might have cost her everything except her continued existence. It felt impossibly wrong.

She was cold, snapping at unfamiliar voices to try and reach Hackett, but the cold and the frustration helped her to keep the vestiges of her dream away. Questions and concerns swirled around her, confusion filled her to her brim. Sitting still made everything hurt more. This was too close to her post-Lazarus awakening (her resurrection) for Shepard to be comfortable, and nothing she could think of kept her from wondering what had really happened, what she had really done, and what was real that was left of her?

Hackett’s voice crackled over the comm and broke into the silence between the three of them. Sanders scrambled up from where he was sleepily sprawled, and Fushikawa turned her head so fast Shepard was sure it was going to fly off.

Strange girl. Strange man.

“Shepard?”

“Yes,” she replied immediately. “Yes, sir, it’s me.”

“You’re awake,” Hackett said and her relief was echoed in his voice. “Shepard, it’s damn good to hear your voice.”

“Likewise, sir.”

“I’m sure you have questions.”

“You have no idea, sir.”

“I need you to set that aside for now. Anderson is down there, still, as well as Lieutenant-Commander John Sawyer.” Fushikawa flinched with her whole body, pulling back to crouch and stare at the ground. Shepard glanced at Sanders for an explanation, but he had gone stone-faced and still. As though filling in the gaps, Hackett continued: “He was in charge of your safety before everything went straight to hell. If you can find them, you should be able to find others and mount a proper resistance.

“Take Earth back,” Shepard said drily.

“Take London back, Commander.”

She considered this.

“Admiral, is Anderson really—“ she broke off, choking on the words. Voices whispered at her ear and she batted a hand at them, like they could be shooed away like flies or daydreams. “He’s really down here,” she settled on, the words dry in her mouth.

“He hasn’t had a chance to leave yet, Commander.” Hackett paused. “He did his best for you, Shepard. They all did.”

There was a twist in her gut. She closed her eyes.

They always did.

When she opened her eyes, Liara looked up at her from where Fushikawa had been, a smile dancing around her lips. A hesitant shift of her head, and Garrus was leaning against the rubble. When their eyes met, he nodded. Together, they were that prime combination of patience and impatience and preparedness and everything she had ever wanted in friends and team members. Grief had seized hold of her, and it was painfully tempting to remain within the diluted fantasy.

But.

“Understood, sir,” she said, and her own words echoed around her ears, drowning everything else out.

* * *

 

The shopping mall was sprawling and huge. Shepard had no memory of it, which seemed to disappointed Sanders. It was Fushikawa who pointed out with a grunt that Shepard wasn’t really shopping around London during the Reaper War.

Shepard gave them both a wry smile. “This is my first time in London, folks.” As an afterthought: “Sorry.”

Sanders looked at her like she had failed every definition of an earthborn hero he could think of. Shepard didn’t know to reply and settled for silence.

Whatever it had been before, the mall had been commandeered as a stable building for the war effort in what Shepard could only think of as the late days of the Reaper war. Everything now was new, she knew it, and with that the base had been transformed into a prison.

She led the way in with every intention of taking as little life down with them as she could. She wasn’t always successful. Here, too, she saw her first real evidence of everything that Fushikawa and Sanders and, late, Hackett had told her of the Crucible’s aftermath. And, if she was being generous, evidence of her own work. Turian, asari, salarian, quarrian, human, all barricaded together and fighting her.

She had no choice but to compartmentalize every new thought, every new worry and feeling, that slipped under her skin. It was stored away with her fear as the hallucination flickered in and out of existence, Fushikawa and Sanders changing with a blink or a tilt of her head into the team she knew she wanted. Something knew this. Something knew what she wanted, what she craved, what she mourned, only maybe preemptively.

She shelved it too.

In the cool basement, they found the cells themselves, storage areas turned into cages like a nightmare from an old vid. Shepard stood at the end of the long hallway, watching the colours of her reality shift in and out of focus around her. The voices grew louder in her ear, her own breathing so large she seemed ready to float to the low ceiling. There was a worry at the back of her mind: would she be able to go back, if she wanted to, if she gave in; was the dream still there, waiting for her, or had she severed the tie to that new part of her mind, or to her imagination and vast hopes?

She was afraid of the answer.

“Sanders,” she said.

“I’m looking for a crew list,” he said behind her. “Or a prisoner list, or something.”

Shepard gritted her teeth. She felt frozen to the floor. That wasn’t what she meant. _That wasn’t_ —

“Fuck a list,” Fushikawa snapped, and it was light a switch in Shepard’s brain.

“Agreed,” she said. “Let’s break them out.”

Sanders didn’t argue.

Most of the doors were locked. Some weren’t even doors, just gates held tight with locks that Shepard snapped loose with a buzz of her borrowed omni-tool. The prisoners they freed varied in mental state: some stared up at her with wide eyes, trembling and unmoving, or rocking back and forth and holding their heads in their hands; some were determined, stumbling to their feet and making their way to Sanders, who talked them through plans like a nervous first-time Halloweener.

When she found, Shepard didn’t recognize him. It took a moment of the world shifting around her, of her mind rearranging itself in her skull.

“Shepard,” Anderson breathed.

“Sir,” she said.

He looked wasted away. He looked exhausted. He looked alive. Shepard choked on air, and undid the lock on his cell with force. There was a burning behind her eyes like needles and she had to _blink blink blink away the memories of Anderson drooping and fading next to her and the sensation of loneliness that wouldn’t fade for the rest of the dream and the panicked reminders she gave herself that they had a job to do what would he want her to do no what wold she want to do that would make him proud there was only once choice and it was the right one it made sense that she would go down with this battle and see him on the far_

side.

He pulled her into a tight hug, squashing her against him. Shepard’s squawk woke her from thoughts.

“Sir, ouch,” she managed out, grumpy but pleased.

He released her. He patted her shoulder and they parted.

“It’s good to see you,” he said, smiling.

“Likewise.”

He gestured further down the cell, already leading the way. Fushikawa joined them, falling into step just behind Shepard, her eyes boring into the back of Shepard’s head. Reality had its nightmares too, and there were memories here that she wasn’t ready to face.

She carried on.

“Sawyer was a mess when I saw him,” Anderson said, his voice echoing around them. One side of his mouth twisted uncomfortably and he glanced at Shepard.

“They must have gone through him to get to you,” Fushikawa said behind her.

Shepard’s stomach twisted. She frowned. “I see,” was all she managed out.

Fushikawa grunted and shoved at Shepard’s shoulder, earning a scowl. “If you’re trying to figure the crazies out,” she muttered. “Do it later! Let’s find John.” Impatience and frustration, as far as Shepard could tell, was Fushikawa’s default, but there was a renewed insistence in her quieted voice that had the wheels in Shepard’s head spinning.

It was Shepard who found him, pale and trembling and pressed against the wall.

Shepard’s jaw clenched.

He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“I’m Commander Shepard,” she announced when the silence carried on, and bent to enter the cell. She held a hand to him. “You must be Lieutenant-Commander Sawyer.”

He flinched. “I am,” he managed out, hoarse.

“Then I think I owe you a thanks or two.”

Sawyer stared at her hand, then finally took it. He stumbled to his feet even with Shepard’s help. They struggled their way out of the cell, with Fushikawa waiting just beyond with wide, bright eyes.

“John!” she gasped out, and rushed to take over for Shepard. Sawyer leaned heavily against her.

“John!” Sanders roared from down the hall, his voice bouncing off the walls and starting a fire in the pit of Shepard’s stomach.

A burst of noise rushed through the freed prisoners, and a man Shepard had thought nearly catatonic finally pulled himself into the hall and was hoisted to his feet by Anderson.

“Well,” Shepard said, hovering by Anderson’s shoulder. “I guess there’s still a war to fight.”

“That’s the current theory.”

Underneath the sudden sense of disorientation, of being alien, her daydreams and nightmares teased at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what me heavy handed no way


End file.
